“I see Miss Drummond has been running the blockade,” she remarked by no means cordially. “And you seem to have grown up very fast, Harriot. You know,” she went on, turning to Dorothea with her most patronizing air, “we always think of Harriot as a little girl who cares more for cakes and candy than anything else.”
If this was said to embarrass her cousin it had quite the opposite effect.
“Oh, that reminds me. Where is Aunt Cora?” she asked with an eager tone in her voice. “I think she wants to see us.”
“My mother is much upset over this news from England,” Corinne replied rather severely, making no move to invite them into the house. “You don’t seem to comprehend the importance of it, Harriot. What we are going to do now that the British have refused to let us fit out vessels in their ports I don’t see. You understand, don’t you, Miss Drummond?” She asked the question as if it was hardly to be expected that the youthful Harriot could appreciate so mature a matter.
“Of course she understands and so do I,” Harriot answered promptly. “But we’ll get on somehow. England is not the only country in the world. You don’t suppose our great Confederacy is so easy to defeat as that, do you?”
“‘Our great Confederacy!’” Corinne wailed. “They’ve insulted us by calling it the ‘so-called Confederacy,’ as if it was nothing and we hadn’t any right to it.”
“I don’t think it matters what they call it,” Dorothea remarked, trying to seem sympathetic. She could not help feeling that Corinne lacked sincerity and that she was just repeating, parrot-like, what she had heard others say.
“Come on, let’s go in,” Harriot said, moving toward the door.
“Yes, do come in.” Corinne’s invitation was not enthusiastic, but Harriot, at least, cared nothing for that. “Ma will want to see you. She’s having a trying time making up her mind what things she ought to take with her.”
“Take with her?” echoed Harriot, standing in the doorway. “Where’s she going?”