“I shall always be sullen to that sort of thing. But we needn’t be troubled; there won’t be an army! To begin with, I am twenty-eight; and to end with, every one will know that I have willed my property to baby; and that makes an immense difference.”
“How does it make a difference?”
“In opportunities for marrying, if not also—as I really believe—for falling in love.”
“I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“True, you do not,” Eve replied; “you are the most extraordinary people in the world, you Southerners; I have been here nearly a month, and I am still constantly struck by it—you never think of money at all. And the strangest point is, that although you never think of it, you don’t in the least know how to get on without it; you cannot improve anything, you can only endure.”
“If you will tell Dilsey to get baby ready, I will see to the boat,” answered Cicely. She was never interested in general questions.
Presently they were afloat. They were in a large row-boat, with Pomp, Plato, Uncle Abram, and a field hand at the oars; Cicely steered; Eve and little Jack were the passengers. The home-island was four miles long, washed by the ocean on one side, the Sound on the other; on the north, Singleton Island lay very near; but on the south there was a broad opening, the next island being six miles distant. Here stood Jupiter Light; this channel was a sea-entrance not only to the line of Sounds, but also to towns far inland, for here opened on the west a great river-mouth, through which flowed to the sea a broad, slow stream coming from the cotton country. They were all good sailors, as they had need to be for such excursions, the Sounds being often rough. The bright winter air, too, was sharp; but Eve was strong, and did not mind it, and the ladies of Romney, like true Southerners, never believed that it was really cold, cold as it is at the North. The voyages in the row-boat had been many; they had helped to fill the days, and the sisters-in-law had had not much else with which to fill them; they had remained as widely apart as in the beginning, Eve absorbed in her own plans, Cicely in her own indifference. Little Jack was always of the party, as his presence made dialogue easy. They had floated many times through the salt marshes between the rattling reeds, they had landed upon other islands, whose fields, like those of Romney, had once been fertile, but which now showed submerged expanses behind the broken dikes, with here and there an abandoned rice-mill. Sometimes they went inland up the river, rowing slowly against the current; sometimes, when it was calm, they went out to sea. To-day they crossed to the other side of the Sound.
“What a long house Romney is!” said Eve, looking back. She did not add, “And if you drop anything on the floor at one end it shakes the other.”
“Yes, it’s large,” Cicely answered. She perceived no fault in it.
“And the name; you know there’s a Romney in Kent?”