“We’ll go down after dinner and look over the yearlen mules,” Tom Singleton said. “I just want to hear what you’ll say about my yearlens.” He was glad in his guest, unaffectedly gracious, the sweetness of his smile giving a flavor to every word he spoke. He was childishly nervous in his care of each hospitality. “As pretty a bunch of mules as ever was. But I just want your opinion. You’re a prime judge of stock, that I well know.”
Like his friend, Anthony, he seemed unaware of Miss Doe’s denials. Their entire unconsciousness of this led Theodosia to distrust her own sense of the house, the furniture, the shading trees in the garden as seen from the windows of the dining-room. Lucas walked slowly about the table, his passing timed to some unreality that colored her whole vision. Her joy in being there spread widely about her and suffused her knowledge of her aunt’s way until she was scarcely sure that she was there at all, scarcely sure that Annie was real or that her grandfather was of the same flesh she had always known him to be. She could touch Annie but was she the same, she questioned, that she had touched before and was she herself present? Her joy in the farm and her pain in her aunt could not interfuse. The talk, as something extra and beyond her reach, flowed about the dogs, the coming elections, or it would drift away to market prices or to books they had read, to the gossip of the town.
“Downing, he’s the best man. I aim to vote for the best man this time,” Tom Singleton said.
Lucas walked evenly about with a dish of some scalloped food, passing it from place to place. Miss Doe spoke then, acquiescing; Downing was, she said, a good man, a good clever man. The county could see what he had in him when he was magistrate. The trees outside moved lightly in the air, green moving against blue in a motion which flowed continually, never returning, some unfamiliar tree which settled a new rhythm into Theodosia’s mind, and a passion to know all of this strange thing exalted her being as she glanced again toward the window where the boughs stood across a meadow and a field and passed thus to the blue of the horizon.
“And Bond in his way is all right,” Anthony said. “For the place he’s expected to fill. And Johns is a right clever man now. Honest, he is, and fair-spoken.”
“I never yet saw any good in old Johns,” Miss Doe said, “and Bond, he’s not one whit better. If that’s what you call honest! I know a tale would make his honesty blush, and you know it too, Anthony Bell.”
It seemed to Theodosia then that the air would split asunder with a great crash, the flaw centering in her aunt’s hands and extending two ways across the solid of the room. She glanced at her uncle in distress and apprehension. His smile then was open and tender, and he reached across and touched her hand with his palm while he finished saying something to her grandfather, and then he said:
“What does Ladybug want? I know what’ll be good for her. Doe, le’s pour some more cream in her milk, outen the cream pitcher. Take this glass around to Miss Doe, Lucas. She needs it to grow on. Growen like a weed now, Ladybug is. What does Little Lady want on her plate? Doe, Little Lady’s got not one thing on her plate.”
The memories of his college sat lightly upon his mind, guests indulgently entertained when they were given any recognition. He had never overtaken the attitude of learning. Anthony would bring some book to the portico and read aloud, or he would say, “Do you remember Thomas, old Thomas?” A professor in some college he would mean. “English letters.... He loved it too well to teach it well....” The aunt would sit with her hands folded in her lap, a smile that scarcely belonged to her lips hovering over the bent hands while the man’s voice intoned the sumptuous lines. She had heard him read all this before, but she lent herself gracefully to the act, and Tom Singleton lowered his head, remembering, or he would glance up at Anthony’s face when some new guest arrived and was joyously greeted and housed for the time in elegant chambers. The reading: