“Ah, Azalea, your father was my dearest! They almost killed me when they came between him and me. He was wayward, I know, but he didn’t have the same ideas of goodness and badness that others have. I always loved him. I love him still.”
“It is beautiful of you, madam grandmother. I hope to be just like that.”
“Very well, Azalea. You shall have your friends to your party if they will come. You shall ask the humblest if you choose.”
“Thank you, thank you, grandmother; you will be proud to know them. The humblest of them are very sweet, but some, I assure you, are not humble at all. They are accomplished enough to win even your approval.”
“No doubt they are charming, my dear granddaughter. But you must remember that you have now come into an important position. Much will be expected of you. You will probably wed a Ravanel. Many of the women of my family did. My son David did also, as you know. It is a custom with us I may say. Yes, a Ravanel or a Grévy.”
“But, dearest grandmother, I must marry the person I love. What will his last name have to do with it?”
“Everything, my dear child. Kindly fetch me yonder book.”
“Yonder book,” Carin, was very much done up in an embroidered cover and was lying on grandmother’s far cabinet. I wish you could see her cabinet of fans. Some are quite historic and all are exquisite.
I brought the book and it proved to be a genealogy of the Bryce family. (Bryce was grandmother’s maiden name.) We studied this for at least an hour, and then grandmother called Martha to carry it to my room that I might have it at hand to consult whenever I wished.
“You will see,” she said, “that the Bryce ladies have married Ravanels, Grévys or Knoxes from time immemorial. You are a Knox. You will marry a Bryce, a Ravanel or a Grévy.”