“Do all men do those things for their wives?” asked Lee in a voice of awe; “I think they must be very nice.”
“All men who are fit to marry, and all Southern men, you may be sure. I want to live long enough to see you married to a man as nearly like your father as possible. I wonder if there are any left; America gallops so. He used to beg me to think of something new I wanted, something it would be difficult to get; and he fairly adored to button my boots; he never failed to put a little kiss right there on my instep when he finished.”
“It must be lovely to be married!” said Lee.
Mrs. Tarleton closed her eyes.
“Was papa perfectly perfect?” asked Lee, as she finished her task and smoothed the kid over her mother’s beautiful instep.
“Perfectly!”
“I heard the butler say once that he was as drunk as a lord.”
“Possibly, but he was perfect all the same. He got drunk like a gentleman—a Southern gentleman, I mean, of course. I always put him to bed and never alluded to it.”
CHAPTER III
LEE had no friends of her own age. The large private school she attended was not patronised by the aristocracy of the city, and Mrs. Tarleton had so thoroughly imbued her daughter with a sense of the vast superiority of the gentle-born Southerner over the mere American, that Lee found in the youthful patrons of the Chambers Institute little likeness to her ideals. The children of her mother’s old friends were educated at home or at small and very expensive schools, preparatory to a grand finish in New York and Europe. Lee had continued to meet several of these fortunate youngsters during the first two of the five years which had followed her father’s death, but as she outgrew her fine clothes, and was put into ginghams for the summers and stout plaids for the winters, she was obliged to drop out of fashionable society. Occasionally she saw her former playmates sitting in their parents’ carriages before some shop in Kearney Street. They always nodded gaily to her with the loyalty of their caste; the magic halo of position survives poverty, scandal and exile.