As she lay awake that night with the moonlight showing through the blinds, the whole of that strange day came before her in pictures: the face of Frances Rhett troubled her, yet she did not know in the least why; it seemed part of the horribleness of automobiles and the anger of Miss Pinckney and the tribulations of Edgar Allan Poe.
Then the fantastic band of forgotten literati trooped before her, led by “Flaccus,” the man who didn’t look as if he had ever kissed a girl, yet who wrote:
| “And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss, That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart.” |
CHAPTER IV
Phyl awoke to the early morning sunlight and the sounds of Charleston.
The chimes of St. Michael’s were striking six and through the summery sunlit air carried by the sea wind stirring the curtains came the cries of the streets and the rumbling of early morning carts.
Oh, those negro cries! the cry of the crab-seller, the orange vendor, the man who sells “monkey meat” dolorous, long drawn out, lazy, you do not know the South till you have heard them.
The sound of a mat being shaken and beaten on the piazza, adjoining that on which her window opened came now, and two voices in dispute.