"We think to some purpose, too, don't we? I wouldn't be an old maid for a fortune!"
Annis was not sure she liked the defection on Charles' part. He assumed a rather lofty air. Louis said he was still a prig, that all the nonsense had not been knocked out of him. But he was a very nice boy, for all that—gentlemanly, refined, and extravagantly fond of his stepmother. There were times when Annis felt inclined to jealousy.
He was going to enter college at Williamsburg.
"It ought to make me proud of my own State, as well as the whole country," he explained impressively to Annis. "And then I shall go to Oxford maybe, or some of the old English places that have the years of antiquity back of them, and stand for all that is highest in knowledge, that have romance and story and grandeur woven into their very stones. Cloistered shades! Think how beautiful they must be. And all the riches of Europe at one's command!"
"If you like that kind of riches," disdainfully. "Wars and bloodshed, rapine and cruelty, grasping and persecution—" Annis paused, out of breath from indignation.
"That's like a girl! You can't distinguish between physical and intellectual progress. All nations have begun on the low round. It is the capability of ascending in the scale that gives them the real grandeur."
"I think they have not ascended very much in the scale," returned Annis rather haughtily, the blackened ruins of the beloved Washington and the day and night of terror before her eyes.
"You are not capable of judging. It is what nations have done in the aggregate. A thousand years have witnessed marvels."
"Still, we haven't gone back to 'Solomon in all his glory.' And Job, you know, had the names of the stars, and understood almost everything."
She had been reading the book of Job aloud to her stepfather, who was always interested in the historical parts of the Bible.