To quell the unfortunate tumult that has arisen in our household as a result of your last article in “Collier’s” I am commanded to advise you that the use of “you-all” in the singular is absodamnlutely non est factum in Virginia, save, perhaps, among the hill people of the Blue Ridge.

Also, take notice that when your hostess, with apparent inadvertence, used the expression in connection with sugar in your demi-tasse, the subsequent blush was due to your failure to catch her witticism, ignorantly mistaking it for a lapse of hers.

My wife was going to write to you herself, but I managed to divert this cruel determination by promising to uphold the honor of the Old Dominion.  There is already too much blood being shed in the world without spilling that of non-combatants as would have been “you-all’s” fate had she gone after you with a weapon more mighty than the sword when in the hands of Mr. Wilson or an outraged woman.

In face of all this and much more, however, my conviction was unshaken.  I talked it over with my companion.  He remembered the episode of the dinner table exactly as I did.  Moreover, I still had my notes, made in the hotel that night.  The lady looked at me.  My companion was several places removed from her at the other side of the table.  How could she have meant to include him?  And how could she have expected me to say how he took his after-dinner coffee?

At last, to reassure myself, I wrote to the wisest, cleverest, most trustworthy lady in the South, and asked her what it all meant.

“Well,” she wrote back from Atlanta, “I will tell you, but I am not sure that you will understand me.  The answer is:  She did, but she didn’t.  She looked at and spoke to you and, of course, by all rules of logic she could not have been intending to make you Morg’s keeper in the matter of coffee dressing. But she never would have said ‘you-all’ if Morg had not been in her mind as joined with you.  The response, according to her thought-connotation, would have been from you and from him.”

This was disconcerting.  So was a letter, received in the same mail, from a gentleman in Charleston: 

It is as plain as the nose on your face that you are not yet convinced that we in the South never use “you-all” with reference to one person.  The case you mentioned proves nothing at all.  The very fact that there were two strangers present justified the use of the expression; we continually use the expression in that way, and in such cases we expect an answer from both persons so addressed.  To illustrate:  just a few days ago I “carried” two girls into an “ice-cream parlor.”  After we were seated, I looked at the one nearest me, and said:  “Well, what will you-all have?”

Physically we are so constructed that unless a person is cross-eyed it is impossible