The Builders by Ellen Glasgow

In January a heavy snow fell, and Letty, who had begun to cough again, was kept indoors for a week. After the morning lessons were over, Mammy Riah amused the child, while Caroline put on her hat and coat, and went for a brisk walk down the lane to the road. Once or twice Mary joined her, but since Alan's return Caroline saw the girl less and less, and no one else in the house appeared to have the spirit for exercise. Blackburn she met only at breakfast and luncheon, and since Christmas he seemed to have become completely engrossed in his plans. After the talk she had heard on the terrace, his figure slowly emerged out of the mist of perplexity in her mind. He was no longer the obscure protagonist of a vague political unrest, for the old dishonourable bond which had linked him, in her imagination, to the Southern Republicans of her father's day, was broken forever.

She was intelligent enough to grasp the difference between the forces of reaction and development; and she understood now that Blackburn had worked out a definite theory -- that his thinking had crystallized into a constructive social philosophy. "He knows the South, he understands it," she thought. "He sees it, not made, but becoming. That is the whole difference between him and father.