“For,” explained Aunt Polly to the young man, in her own confident way, “in spite of your travels, you are a native Virginian, Arthur, and when you have dropped into the ways of the country, people will overlook the fact that you have lived so much at the north, and even in Europe.”
“But why, Aunt Polly,” asked Arthur, “should that fact be deemed something to be ‘overlooked?’ Surely travel broadens one’s views and—”
“Oh, yes, of course, in the case of people not born in Virginia. But a Virginian doesn’t need it, and it upsets his ideas. You see when a Virginian travels he forgets what is best. He actually grows like other people. You yourself show the ill effects of it in a hundred ways. Of course you haven’t quite lost your character as a Virginian, and you’ll gradually come back to it here at Wyanoke; but ‘evil communications corrupt good manners,’ and I can’t help seeing it in you—at least in your speech. You don’t pronounce your words correctly. You say ‘cart’ ‘carpet’ and ‘garden’ instead of ‘cyart’ ‘cyarpet’ and ‘gyarden.’ And you flatten your a’s dreadfully. You say ‘grass’ instead of ‘grawss’ and ‘basket’ instead of ‘bawsket’ and all that sort of thing. And you roll your r’s dreadfully. It gives me a chill whenever I hear you say ‘master’ instead of ‘mahstah.’ But you’ll soon get over that, and in the meantime, as you were born in Virginia and are the head of an old Virginia family, the gentlemen and ladies who are coming every day to welcome you, are very kind about it. They overlook it, as your misfortune, rather than your fault.”
“That is certainly very kind of them, Aunt Polly. I can’t imagine anything more generous in the mind than that. But—well, never mind.”
“What were you going to say, Arthur?”
“Oh, nothing of any consequence. I was only thinking that perhaps my Virginia neighbors do not lay so much stress upon these things as you do.”
“Of course not. That is one of the troubles of this time. Since we let the Yankees build railroads through Virginia, everybody here wants to travel. Why, half the gentlemen in this county have been to New York!”
“How very shocking!” said Arthur, hiding his smile behind his hand.
“That’s really what made the trouble for poor Dorothy,” mused Aunt Polly. “If her father hadn’t gone gadding about—he even went to Europe you know—Dorothy never would have been born.”
“How fortunate that would have been! But tell me about it, Aunt Polly. You see I don’t quite understand in what way it would have been better for Dorothy not to have been born—unless we accept the pessimist philosophy, and consider all human life a curse.”