“They are helpless, like all the rest,”
said her father, with the same deference to her as
to other women. “I do not blame them.”
“Oh, mah goodness! Didn’t you say,
sir, that Mr. Beaton had bad manners?”
Alma relieved a confusion which he seemed to feel
in reference to her. “Bad manners?
He has no manners! That is, when he’s himself.
He has pretty good ones when he’s somebody else.”
Miss Woodburn began, “Oh, mah-” and then
stopped herself. Alma’s mother looked at
her with distressed question, but the girl seemed perfectly
cool and contented; and she gave her mind provisionally
to a point suggested by Colonel Woodburn’s talk.
“Still, I can’t believe it was right to
hold people in slavery, to whip them and sell them.
It never did seem right to me,” she added, in
apology for her extreme sentiments to the gentleness
of her adversary.
“I quite agree with you, madam,” said
the Colonel. “Those were the abuses of
the institution. But if we had not been vitiated
on the one hand and threatened on the other by the
spirit of commercialism from the North—and
from Europe, too—those abuses could have
been eliminated, and the institution developed in
the direction of the mild patriarchalism of the divine
intention.” The Colonel hitched his chair,
which figured a hobby careering upon its hind legs,
a little toward Mrs. Leighton and the girls approached
their heads and began to whisper; they fell deferentially
silent when the Colonel paused in his argument, and
went on again when he went on.
At last they heard Mrs. Leighton saying, “And
have you heard from the publishers about your book
yet?”
Then Miss Woodburn cut in, before her father could
answer: “The coase of commercialism is
on that, too. They are trahing to fahnd oat whethah
it will pay.”
“And they are right-quite right,” said
the Colonel. “There is no longer any other
criterion; and even a work that attacks the system
must be submitted to the tests of the system.”
“The system won’t accept destruction on
any othah tomes,” said Miss Woodburn, demurely.
At the reception, where two men in livery stood aside
to let him pass up the outside steps of the house,
and two more helped him off with his overcoat indoors,
and a fifth miscalled his name into the drawing-room,
the Syracuse stone-cutter’s son met the niece
of Mrs. Horn, and began at once to tell her about
his evening at the Dryfooses’. He was in
very good spirits, for so far as he could have been
elated or depressed by his parting with Alma Leighton
he had been elated; she had not treated his impudence
with the contempt that he felt it deserved; she must
still be fond of him; and the warm sense of this,
by operation of an obscure but well-recognized law
of the masculine being, disposed him to be rather
fond of Miss Vance. She was a slender girl, whose
semi-aesthetic dress flowed about her with an accentuation
