“And nobody else was here when Agatha went out into the rain.  Now, what if she had just let Agatha go, without trying to stop her?  It would have been perfectly simple.  So is this.  All I have to do is to take them off now.”

Colonel Musgrave negligently returned to his perusal of the afternoon paper.  “You are suggesting—­if you will overlook my frankness—­the most deplorable sort of nonsense, Patricia.”

“I know exactly how Balaam felt,” she said, irrelevantly, and fell to shuffling the cards.  “You don’t, and you won’t, understand that Virginia is a human being.  In any event, I wish you would get rid of her.”

“I couldn’t decently do that,” said Rudolph Musgrave, with careful patience.  “Virginia’s faithfulness has been proven by too many years of faithful service.  Nothing more strikingly attests the folly of freeing the negro than the unwillingness of the better class of slaves to leave their former owners—­”

“Now you are going to quote a paragraph or so from your Gracious Era.  As if I hadn’t read everything you ever wrote!  You are a fearful humbug in some ways, Rudolph.”

“And you are a red-headed rattlepate, madam.  But seriously, Patricia, you who were reared in the North are strangely unwilling to concede that we of the South are after all best qualified to deal with the Negro Problem.  We know the negro as you cannot ever know him.”

“You!  Oh, God ha’ mercy on us!” mocked Patricia.  “There wasn’t any Negro Problem hereabouts, you beautiful idiot, so long as there were any negroes.  Why, to-day there is hardly one full-blooded negro in Lichfield.  There are only a thousand or so of mulattoes who share the blood of people like your Uncle Edward.  And for the most part they take after their white kin, unfortunately.  And there you have the Lichfield Negro Problem in a nutshell.  It is a venerable one and fully set forth in the Bible.  You needn’t attempt to argue with me, because you are a ninnyhammer, and I am a second Nestor.  The Holy Scriptures are perfectly explicit as to what happens to the heads of the children and their teeth too.”

“I wish you wouldn’t jest about such matters—­”

“Because it isn’t lady-like?  But, Rudolph, you know perfectly well that I am not a lady.”

“My dear!” he cried, in horror that was real, “and what on earth have I said even to suggest—­”

“Oh, not a syllable; it isn’t at all the sort of thing that your sort says ...  And I am not your sort.  I don’t know that I altogether wish I were.  But if I were, it would certainly make things easier,” Patricia added sharply.

“My dear—!” he again protested.

“Now, candidly, Rudolph”—­relinquishing the game, she fell to shuffling the cards—­“just count up the number of times this month that my—­oh, well!  I really don’t know what to call it except my deplorable omission in failing to be born a lady—­has seemed to you to yank the very last rag off the gooseberry-bush?”