"How can you know that?" she asked in genuine surprise.
"Because you spoke of 'a thousand little things.' I wish you would tell me about a dozen of them, or even half a dozen."
With a world of childlike seriousness in her wide open eyes the girl responded:
"I suppose I ought not to have said a thousand. That was an exaggeration, and exaggeration is as bad as any other kind of fibbing, isn't it?"
"In some cases, yes—in some, no. Certainly it was not so in this case. Your phrase carried to my mind precisely the thought you had in your own, and so it was perfectly truthful."
"I'm glad you think so. I try always to tell the truth."
"So I should imagine. Now will you not go on and tell me some of the things that please you in our Virginia life? Is it so different from your life up North? You see I have never been North."
"Oh, yes, so different! I think most of us up North are good people, just as I suppose most people are everywhere. But there's a difference—a something, I don't know just what. Yes, I do, too, in part at least, though I'm not sure I can put it into words. We live within ourselves, and you don't. We love our friends and are kind to them, but we aren't close to them, as people down here are. It is because we are shy, I suppose. Our attitude toward money values is different. I don't know that our people care more about money than you do, but—well, we take it into account as you do not. But that isn't what I mean. There is a certain graciousness in your ways of living, a warmth, a color—I don't know what to call it—that fascinates me. We are scrupulously polite to each other; you are cordially courteous instead. I suppose that too is because we are shyer than you are. We shrink from self revelation as you do not. I think we are really as warm-hearted as you Virginians are, but we are more reserved."
"You are doubtless right. I've observed that temperamental peculiarity in the Northern men I've met. At the University there was a young man from Boston who became my chum under rather peculiar circumstances, and I studied him closely. Because of a certain delicacy of constitution which rendered your Boston winters dangerous to his health, he was sent to the University of Virginia instead of Harvard. He didn't know our ways, and as a 'Yankee'—you know how unjustly that word has come to have evil significance with us—he was a good deal shunned, and things were said, and—well, it so came about that he and I became chums and occupied a room together on the lawn."
"Yes, I know," she answered dreamily, as if recalling a story. "But you are suppressing the truth, Mr. Westover."