FLIGHT INTO SPRING

All the stereotypes are here. It is 1865 and 16-year-old Sally Day Hammond, a Maryland belle whose family has supported the Northern cause, is awaiting the return of Charles Horne, a young Connecticut soldier who is her undeclared sweetheart. When he does show up they marry, apparently without a hitch, and it isn't until halfway through the book that a conflict develops. The bride and groom arrive at his parent's home, and Sally Day encounters Yankee coldness in the persons of her new in-laws. Poor Sally Day just can't adjust to wearing linsey-woolsey at dinner, to Mr. Horne's Puritanism, or to Mrs. Horne's silent obedience. There are, of course, one or two unkind Southerners and a few compassionate Yankees thrown in, in an attempt to round out the picture, but the reader is generally led to believe that Southerners were warm, gracious and human; Northerners unfeeling, narrow-minded, and tight-lipped. Sally Day's final coup is her attempted escape to run home to mother, but she is apprehended by her furious young husband in the nick of time. Has she matured in the process? Not from any written evidence.