"Of course I am, Aunt Matoaca, but one doesn't forget. I met Ben first when I was six years old. Mamma and I stopped at his house in a storm one night on our way over to grandmama's. We were soaking wet, and they were very kind and dried us and gave us hot things to drink, and his mother wrapped me up in a shawl and sent me here with mamma. I shall always remember how good they were, and how he broke off a red geranium from his mother's plant and gave it to me."
As she told her story, Miss Mitty watched her attentively, the expression of faint wonder in her eyes and her narrow eyebrows, and her pleasant, rather pained smile etched delicately about her fine, thin lips. Her long, oval face, suffused now by an unusual colour, rose above the quaint old coffee urn, on which the Fairfax crest, belonging to her mother's family, was engraved. If any passion could have been supposed to rock that flat, virgin bosom, I should have said that it was moved by a passion of wounded pride.
"Is your coffee right, Mr. Starr? Have you cream enough?" she enquired politely. "Selim, give Mr. Starr a partridge."
My coffee was right, and I declined the bird, which would have stuck in my throat. The united pride of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, I told myself, could not equal that possessed by a single obscure son of a stone-cutter.
"If you are as hungry as I am, you are famished," observed Sally, with a gallant effort to make a semblance of gayety sport on a frozen atmosphere. "Aunt Matoaca, have pity and give me a muffin."
Muffins were passed by Miss Matoaca; waffles were presented immediately by Selim.
"Do take a hot one," urged Miss Matoaca anxiously, "yours is quite cold."
I took a hot one, and after placing it on the small white and gold plate, swore desperately to myself that I would not eat a mouthful in that house until I could eat there as an equal. The faint wonder beneath the pained fixed smile on Miss Mitty's face stabbed me like a knife. All her anxious hospitality, all her offers of cream and partridges, could not for a single minute efface it. Turning my head I discerned the same expression, still fainter, still gentler, reflected on Miss Matoaca's lips—as if some subtle bond of sympathy between them were asking always, beneath the hereditary courtesy: "Can this be possible? Are we, whose mother was a Fairfax, whose father was a Bland, sitting at our own table with a man who is not a gentleman by birth?—who has even brought a market basket to our kitchen door? What has become of the established order if such a thing as this can happen to two unprotected Virginia ladies?"
And it was quite characteristic of their race, of their class, that the greater the wonder grew in their gentle minds, the more sedulously they plied me with coffee and partridges and preserves—that the more their souls abhorred me, the more lavish became their hands. Divided as they were by their principles, something stronger than a principle now held the sisters together, and this was a passionate belief in the integrity of their race.
Again Selim handed the waffles in a frozen silence, and again Sally made an unsuccessful attempt to produce an appearance of animation.