“Oh, Mr. Valiant!” Rickey called after them as the car started. “Now you’re at Damory Court, are you going to let us children keep on playing up at the Hemlocks?”
“Well I should think so!” he answered. “Play there all the time, if you like.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Rickey, radiant. “And there won’t be any snakes there now, for you’ve cleared all the underbrush away.”
As they sped on, Katharine’s cheek had a faintly heightened color. But, “What a deliciously odd child!” she laughed.
“She’s a character,” he said. “She worships the ground Miss Dandridge walks on. There’s a good reason for it. You must get Miss Chalmers to tell you the story.”
Where the Red Road stretched level before them, he threw the throttle open for a long rush through the thymy-scented air. The light, late afternoon breeze drew by them, sweeping back Katharine’s graceful sinuous veil and spraying them with odors of clover and sunny fruit. They passed orchard clumps bending with young apples, boundless aisles of green, young-tasseled corn and shadowy groves that smelled of fern and sassafras, opening out into more sun-lighted vistas overarched by the intense penetrable blue of the June sky.
John Valiant had never seemed to her so wholly good to see, with his waving hair ruffling in their flight and the westerning sun shining redly on his face. Midway of this spurt he looked at her to say: “Did you ever know a more beautiful countryside? See how the pink-and-yellow of those grain fields fades into the purple of the hills. Very few painters have ever captured a tint like that. It’s like raspberries crushed in curdled milk.”
“I’ve quite lost my heart to it all,” she said, her voice jolting with the speed of their course. “It’s a perfect pastoral ... so different from our terrific city pace.... Of course it must be a trifle dull at times ... seeing the same people always ... and without the theater and the opera and the whirl about one—but ... the kind of life one reads about ... in the novels of the South, you know ... I suppose one doesn’t realize that it actually exists until one comes to a Southern place like this. And the negro servants! How odd it must be to have a white-headed old darky in a brass-buttoned swallow-tail for a butler! So picturesque! At Judge Chalmers’, I have a feeling all the time that I’m walking through a stage rehearsal.”
The car slackened speed as it slid by a whitewashed cabin at whose entrance sat a dusky gray-bearded figure. Valiant pointed. “Do you see him?” he asked.
“I see a very ordinary old colored man sitting on the door-step,” Katharine replied.