“You certainly understand it all,” John Mayrant repeated.  “It’s amazing to find you saying things that I have thought were my own private notions.”

I laughed.  “Oh, I fancy there are more than two of us in the country.”

“Even the square piano and Mr. Pinckney,” he went on.  “I didn’t suppose anybody had thought things like that, except myself.”

“Oh,” I again said lightly, “any American—­any, that is, of the world—­ who has a colonial background for his family, has thought, probably, very much the same sort of things.  Of course it would be all Greek or gibberish to the new people.”

He took me up with animation.  “The new people!  My goodness, sir, yes!  Have you seen them?  Have you seen Newport, for instance?” His diction now (and I was to learn it was always in him a sign of heightening intensity) grew more and more like the formal speech of his ancestors.  “You have seen Newport?” he said.

“Yes; now and then.”

“But lately, sir?  I knew we were behind the times down here, sir, but I had not imagined how much.  Not by any means!  Kings Port has a long road to go before she will consider marriage provincial and chastity obsolete.”

“Dear me, Mr. Mayrant!  Well, I must tell you that it’s not all quite so—­ so advanced—­as that, you know.  That’s not the whole of Newport.”

He hastened to explain.  “Certainly not, sir!  I would not insult the honorable families whom I had the pleasure to meet there, and to whom my name was known because they had retained their good position since the days when my great-uncle had a house and drove four horses there himself.  I noticed three kinds of Newport, sir.”

“Three?”

“Yes.  Because I took letters; and some of the letters were to people who—­who once had been, you know; it was sad to see the thing, sir, so plain against the glaring proximity of the other thing.  And so you can divide Newport into those who leave to sell their old family pictures, those who have to buy their old family pictures, and the lucky few who need neither buy nor sell, who are neither goin’ down nor bobbing up, but who have kept their heads above the American tidal wave from the beginning and continue to do so.  And I don’t believe that there are any nicer people in the world than those.”

“Nowhere!” I exclaimed.  “When Near York does her best, what’s better?—­If only those best set the pace!”

“If only!” he assented.  “But it’s the others who get into the papers, who dine the drunken dukes, and make poor chambermaids envious a thousand miles inland!”

“There should be a high tariff on drunken dukes,” I said.

“You’ll never get it!” he declared.  “It’s the Republican party whose daughters marry them.”

I rocked with enjoyment where I sat; he was so refreshing.  And I agreed with him so well.  “You’re every bit as good as Miss Beaufain,” I cried.

“Oh, no; oh, no!  But I often think if we could only deport the negroes and Newport together to one of our distant islands, how happily our two chief problems would be solved!”