I had never heard of her.

“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.