“Was it wrong of me to look at them?” asked Phyl. “I never would have done it only—only—Oh, I don’t know, I somehow felt she wouldn’t mind. She seemed like a sister—I would never dream of looking at another person’s letters but she did not seem like another person. I can’t explain. It was just as though the letters were my own—just exactly as though they were my own when I found them in my hands.”
Phyl was talking with her eyes fixed before her as though she were looking across some great distance.
Miss Pinckney gave a little shiver, then supper being over she rose from the table and led the way from the room.
Richard Pinckney had dined with them but he was out for supper somewhere or another. They went to the drawing-room and had not been there for more than a few minutes when Frances Rhett was announced.
The Rhetts were on intimate enough terms with the Pinckneys to call in like this without ceremony; Frances had called to speak to Miss Pinckney about some charity affair she was getting up in a hurry, but she had not been five minutes in the room before Phyl knew that she had called to look at her. To look at the girl who had come to live with the Pinckneys, the red headed girl. Phyl did not know that girls of Frances’ type dread red haired girls, if they are pretty, as rabbits dread stoats, but she did know in some uncanny way that Frances Rhett considered Richard Pinckney as her own property to be protected against all comers.
All at once and new born, the woman awoke in her instinctive, mistrustful and armed.
Frances Rhett, despite Miss Pinckney’s dispraise of her, was a most formidable person as far as the opposite sex was concerned. One of the women of whom other women say, “Well, I don’t know what he sees in her, I’m sure.”
A brunette of eighteen who looked twenty, full-blooded, full lipped, full curved, sleepy-eyed, she seemed dressed by nature for the part of the world and the flesh—with a hint of the devil in those deep, dark, pansy blue eyes that seemed now by artificial light almost black.
“Well, I’ll subscribe ten dollars,” said Miss Pinckney; “I reckon the darkie babies won’t be any the worse for a crêche and maybe not very much better for it. If you could get up an institution to distil good manners and respect for their betters into their heads I’d give you forty. I’m sure I don’t know what the coloured folk of Charleston are coming to, one of them nearly pushed me off the sidewalk the other day, bag of impudence! and the way they look at one in the street with that sleery leery what-d’-you-call-yourself-you-white-trash grin on their faces s’nough to raise Cain in any one’s heart.”
“I know,” replied the dark girl, “and they are getting worse; the whip is the only thing that as far as I can see ever made them possible, and what we have now is the result of your beautiful Abolitionists.”