“No? She has been North lately. I thought you might have met her. Her
father takes her North, I believe, whenever any one will invite them.
They have sometimes managed to make it extend through an unbroken year.
Newport, I am credibly informed, greatly admires her. We in Kings
Port have never (except John Mayrant, apparently) seen anything in her
beauty, which Northerners find so exceptional.”
“What is her type?” I inquired.
“I consider that she looks like a steel wasp. And she has the assurance
to call herself a Kings Port girl. Her father calls himself a general,
and it is repeated that he ran away at the battle of Chattanooga. I hope
you will come to see me another day, when you can spare time from the
battle of Cowpens. I am Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, the other lady is
Mrs. Gregory St. Michael. I wonder if you will keep us all straight?”
And smiling, the little lady, whose shy manner and voice I had found to
veil as much spirit as her predecessor’s, dismissed me and went up her
steps, letting herself into her own house.
The boy in question, the boy of the cake, John Mayrant, was coming out
of the gate at which I next rang. The appearance of his boyish figure
and well-carried head struck me anew, as it had at first; from his whole
person one got at once a strangely romantic impression. He looked at me,
made as if he would speak, but passed on. Probably he had been hearing
as much about me as I had been hearing about him. At this house the
black servant had not gone home for the night, and if the mistress had
been out to take a look at the steam yacht, she had returned.
“My sister,” she said, presenting me to a supremely fine-looking old
lady, more chiselled, more august, than even herself. I did not catch
this lady’s name, and she confined herself to a distant, though perhaps
not unfriendly, greeting. She was sitting by a work-table, and she
resumed some embroidery of exquisite appearance, while my hostess talked
to me.
Both wore their hair in a simple fashion to suit their years, which must
have been seventy or more; both were dressed with the dignity that such
years call for; and I may mention here that so were all the ladies above
a certain age in this town of admirable old-fashioned propriety. In New
York, in Boston, in Philadelphia, ladies of seventy won’t be old ladies
any more; they’re unwilling to wear their years avowedly, in quiet
dignity by their firesides; they bare their bosoms and gallop
egregiously to the ball-rooms of the young; and so we lose a particular
graciousness that Kings Port retains, a perspective of generations.
We happen all at once, with no background, in a swirl of haste and
similarity.
One of the many things which came home to me during the conversation
that now began (so many more things came home than I can tell you!) was
that Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s tongue was assuredly “downright” for
Kings Port. This I had not at all taken in while she talked to me, and
her friend’s reference to it had left me somewhat at a loss. That better
precision and choice of words which I have mentioned, and the manner
in which she announced her opinions, had put me in mind of several fine
ladles whom I had known in other parts of the world; but hers was an
individual manner, I was soon to find, and by no means the Kings Port
convention. This convention permitted, indeed, condemnations of one’s
neighbor no less sweeping, but it conveyed them in a phraseology far
more restrained.
“I cannot regret your coming to Kings Port,” said my hostess, after we
had talked for a little while, and I had complimented the balmy March
weather and the wealth of blooming flowers; “but I fear that Fanning is
not a name that you will find here. It belongs to North Carolina.”
I smiled and explained that North Carolina Fannings were useless to me.
“And, if I may be so bold, how well you are acquainted with my errand!”
I cannot say that my hostess smiled, that would be too definite; but I
can say that she did not permit herself to smile, and that she let
me see this repression. “Yes,” she said, “we are acquainted with your
errand, though not with its motive.”