Alfar's analysis cuts to the quick of the socioeconomic structures that underlie marriage, primogeniture, monarchy, and imperialism.

When Margaret Frances Desha returned to Batesville, the most accomplished woman of the town, she was wooed and won by William French Denton, a distinguished lawyer of Batesville, and a gift of Tennessee to Arkansas growth.

And when belief was dead and God a myth, / And the world seemed a wandering mote of evil, / Endurable only by its impermanence, / And all the planets perishable urns / Of perishable ashes, to you alone I clung / Amid the unspeakable loneliness of the universe.

There's little can be said in 't; 'Tis against the rule of nature.