"Yes. Joe is still promising me to clip them properly."
The old red-brick of the house now glowed on them between the boughs of tulip-trees and horse-chestnuts. They passed the clump of great acacia trees, where stood the round, green tables, covered with pots of pink and white geraniums. Sophy recalled that day when the London window-boxes had brought this memory of home. Now she was here. Home was reality—London the memory.
Judge Macon came down the front steps and took her in his arms as though she had been in truth his sister. He was much moved. Somehow to see her in the dull black of widow's weeds struck him as unnatural. Like most men, he hated "mourning." It hurt him to see her brightness thus quenched with crêpe.
"Doggone it, Chartie," he said to his wife that night when they were alone, "get that black off of our Sophy as soon as you can. For the Lord's sake, get some of it off right away. A human being can't go through a Virginia summer draped like a hearse!"
Charlotte said:
"Oh, Joe, don't talk so gruesomely. She'll wear white I'm sure—poor darling."
Then she went to his shoulder and cried frankly.
"I hate it as much as you do," she said. "It almost makes me 'lose my religion' to think of Sophy's being a widow. Don't you know how we—how every one—always thought of Sophy as being brilliant and happy?"
"Yes, yes; so we did, so we did," he soothed her. Then he added soberly:
"But those are just the people who seem to attract misfortune ... like lightning-rods," he concluded quaintly.