Patty's whole education tended to foster her pride, and in Patty's circumstances pride was conservative; it saved her from possible assimilation with the vulgarity about her. She was a lily among hollyhocks. Her mother had come of an "old family"—in truth, of two or three old families. All of them had considered that attachment to the Established Church was part and parcel of their gentility, and most of them had been staunch Tories in the Revolution. Patty had inherited from her mother refinement, pride, and a certain lofty inflexibility of disposition. In this congenial soil Mrs. Lumsden had planted traditional prejudices. Patty read her Prayer-book, and wished that she might once attend the stately Episcopal service; she disliked the lowness of all the sects: the sing-song of the Baptist preacher and the rant of the Methodist itinerant were equally distasteful. She had never seen a clergyman in robes, but she tried, from her mother's descriptions, to form a mental picture of the long-drawn dignity of the service in an Old Virginia country church. Patty was imaginative, like most girls of her age; but her ideals were ruled by the pride in which she had been cradled.
For the Methodists she entertained a peculiar aversion. Methodism was new, and, like everything new, lacked traditions, picturesqueness, mustiness, and all the other essentials of gentility in religious matters. The converts were rude, vulgar, and poor; the preachers were illiterate, and often rough in voice and speech; they made war on dancing and jewelry, and dancing and jewelry appertained to good-breeding. Ever since her father had been taken with that strange disorder called "the jerks," she had hated the Methodists worse than ever. They had made a direct attack on her pride.
The story of Morton's gambling had duly reached the ears of Patty. The thoughtful unkindness of her father could not leave her without so delectable a morsel of news. He felt sure that Patty's pride would be outraged by conduct so reckless, and he omitted nothing from the tale—the loss of horse and gun, the offer to stake his hat and coat, the proposal to commit suicide, the flight upon the forfeited horse—such were the items of Captain Lumsden's story. He told it at the table in order to mortify Patty as much as possible in the presence of her brothers and sisters and the hired men. But the effect was quite different from his expectations. With that inconsistency characteristic of the most sensible women when they are in love, Patty only pitied Morton's misfortunes. She saw him, in her imagination, a hapless and homeless wanderer. She would not abandon him in his misfortunes. He should have one friend at least. She was sorry he had gambled, but gambling was not inconsistent with gentlemanliness. She had often heard that her mother would have inherited a plantation if her grandfather had been able to let cards alone. Gambling was the vice of gentlemen, a generous and impulsive weakness. Then, too, she laid the blame on her favorite scape-goat. If it had not been for Kike's exciting exhortation and the inconsiderate violence of the Methodist revival, Morton's misfortune would not have befallen him. Patty forgave in advance. Love condones all sins except sins against love.
It was with more than his usual enjoyment of gossip that the school-master hurried home to the Captain's that evening to tell the story of Morton's return, and to boast that he had already soiphered it out by the single Rule of Thray that Moirton would come out roight. The Captain, as he ate his waffles with country molasses, slurred the whole thing, and wanted to know if he was going to refuse to pay a debt of honor and keep the mare, when he had fairly lost her gambling with Burchard. But Patty inly resolved to show her lover more affection than ever. She would make him feel that her love would be constant when the friendship of others failed. She liked to flatter herself, as other young women have to their cost, that her love would reform her lover.
Patty knew he would come. She went about her work next morning, humming some trifling air, that she might seem nonchalant. But after awhile she happened to think that her humming was an indication of pre-occupation. So she ceased to hum. Then she remembered that people would certainly interpret silence as indicative of meditation; she immediately fell a-talking with might and main, until one of the younger girls asked: "What does make Patty talk so much?" Upon which, Patty ceased to talk and went to work harder than ever; but, being afraid that the eagerness with which she worked would betray her, she tried to work more slowly until that was observed. The very devices by which we seek to hide mental pre-occupation generally reveal it.
At last Patty was fain to betake herself to the loom-room, where she could think without having her thoughts guessed at. Here, too, she would be alone when Morton should come.
Poor Morton, having told his mother of his religious change, found it hard indeed to tell Patty. But he counted certainly that she would censure him for gambling, which would make it so much easier for him to explain to her that the only way for him to escape from vice was to join the Methodists, and thus give up all to a better life. He shaped some sentences founded upon this supposition. But after all his effort at courage, and all his praying for grace to help him to "confess Christ before men," he found the cross exceedingly hard to bear; and when he set his foot upon the threshold of the loom-room, his heart was in his mouth and his face was suffused with guilty blushes. Ah, weak nature! He was not blushing for his sins, but for his repentance!
Patty, seeing his confusion, determined to make him feel how full of forgiveness love was. She saw nobleness in his very shame, and she generously resolved that she would not ask, that she would not allow, a confession. She extended her hand cordially and beamed upon him, and told him how glad she was that he had come back, and—and—well—; she couldn't find anything else to say, but she urged him to sit down and handed him a splint-bottom chair, and tried for the life of her to think of something to say—the silence was so embarrassing. But talking for talk's sake is always hard. One talks as one breathes—best when volition has nothing to do with it.
The silence was embarrassing to Morton, but not half so much so as Patty's talk. For he had not expected this sort of an opening. If she had accused him of gambling, if she had spurned him, the road would have been plain. But now that she loved him and forgave him of her own sweet generosity, how should he smite her pride in the face by telling her that he had joined himself to the illiterate, vulgar fanatical sect of ranting Methodists, whom she utterly despised? Truly the Enemy had set an unexpected snare for his unwary feet. He had resolved to confess his religious devotion with heroic courage, but he had not expected to be disarmed in this fashion. He talked about everything else, he temporized, he allowed her to turn the conversation as she would, hoping vainly that she would allude to his gambling. But she did not. Could it be that she had not heard of it? Must he then reveal that to her also?
While he was debating the question in his mind, Patty, imagining that he was reproaching himself for the sin and folly of gambling, began to talk of what had happened in the neighborhood—how Jake Sniger "fell with the power" on Sunday and got drunk on Tuesday: "that's all this Methodist fuss amounts to, you know," she said. Morton thought it ungracious to blurt out at this moment that he was a Methodist: there would be an air of contradiction in the avowal; so he sat still while Patty turned all the sobbing and sighing, and shouting and loud praying of the meetings into ridicule. And Morton became conscious that it was getting every minute more and more difficult for him to confess his conversion. He thought it better to return to his gambling for a starting point.