From Michael’s he came home gaily, a most outrageous posy pinned upon him by way of honor, and whistling a Slavic love song so dismal that one inferred love must be something like toothache for painfulness.  He had had such a bully time, he told me.  Big Jan had been there with his wife, an old friend of Michael’s Katya.  Although pale, and still somewhat shaky as to legs, Jan had willingly enough shaken hands with his conqueror.

It seemed quite right and natural that he and Jan should presently enter into a sort of Dual Alliance.  Meester Fleent was to be Arbitrator Extraordinary.  When he stipulated that thereafter Big Jan was only to tackle a man his own size, everybody cheered madly, and Mrs. Jan herself beamed red-eyed approval.  She said her prayers to the man who had trounced Jan into righteousness.

But from the Eustis dinner, to which he went with my mother, he came home somber and heavy-hearted.  Laurence was conspicuously absent; it is true he was away, defending his first big case in another part of the State.  But Mr. George Inglesby was just as conspicuously present, apparently on the best of all possible terms with himself, the world in general, and Mrs. James Eustis in particular.  His presence in that house, in the face of persistent rumors, made at least two guests uneasy.  Mrs. Eustis showed him a most flattering attention.  She was deeply impressed by him.  He had just aided her pet mission in China—­what he had given the heathen would have buttered my children’s bread for many a day.  Also, he was all but lyrical in his voicing of the shibboleth that Woman’s Sphere is the Home, wherein she should be adored, enshrined, and protected.  Woman and the Home!  All the innate chivalry of Southern manhood—­

I don’t know that Louisa’s Ma was ever enshrined or protected by the chivalry of any kind of manhood, no, nor any of the mill women.  Their kind don’t know the word.  But Mrs. Eustis was, and she agreed with Mr. Inglesby’s noble sentiments.

“Parson, you should have heard him!” raved the Butterfly Man.  “There’s a sort of man down here that’s got chivalry like another sort’s got hookworm, and he makes the man that hasn’t got either want to set up an image to the great god Dam!

“You’d think being chivalrous would be enough for him, wouldn’t you?” continued the Butterfly Man, bitterly.  “Nix!  What’s he been working the heavy charity lay for, except that it’s his turn to be a misunderstood Christian?  Doesn’t charity cover a multitude of skins, though?  And doesn’t it beat a jimmy when it comes to breaking into society!”

Mary Virginia, he added in an altered voice, had been exquisite in a frock all silver lace and shimmery stuffs like moonbeams, and with a rope of pearls about her throat, and in her black hair.  Appleboro folks do not affect orchids, but Mary Virginia wore a huge cluster of those exotics.  She had been very gracious to the Butterfly Man and Madame.  But only for a brief bright minute had she been the Mary Virginia they knew.  All the rest of the evening she seemed to grow statelier, colder, more dazzlingly and imperially regal.  And her eyes were like frozen sapphires under her level brows, and her mouth was the red splendid bow of Pride.