“Well, you see, I left there when I was only just a little thing. All I can remember is a big white house and a lot of colored peop—” she caught herself—“a lot of darkies. My parents both died and my—my aunt took me. That is to say, she wasn’t my real aunt; just a close friend of the family.” Swiftly she continued to improvise. “But I always called her Auntie. She moved up North to live and brought me along with her. Her name was Smith.” (That much was pure inspiration, Smith being such a good safe common name.) “So that’s where I’ve lived most of my life—in the North. I don’t know scarcely anything about my relatives. But at heart I’ve always been a very intense Southerner.”
“I can well understand that,” he said, and the badgered fictionist hoped she had steered him back into safer shallows. “A real Southerner never ceases to be one. But I might have guessed that you had been reared among Northern influences and Northern surroundings. Your voice, in speaking, seems to betray the fact.”
She experienced a disconcerting shock. Until now, she had thought practice had made perfect. Besides, she had studied under what she regarded as first-rate schooling. At the outset of her stage career, when she first decided to be a Southern girl because being a Southern girl was popular and somehow had romance in it, she had copied her dialectics from a leading lady in a musical production, who in turn had copied the intonations of a stage director who once had been a successful black-face comedian. And if a man who had been an end man in a minstrel show for years didn’t know how Southerners talked, who did? For months, now, barring only that nosey Tobe Daly, nobody had shown suspicion. Possibly Captain Teal read the flustered look on her face and mistook its purport, for he hastened to add:
“I mean to say that the North has contaminated—or perhaps I should say, affected—your Southern pronunciation. My hearing is not the best in the world but, as well as I may hear, it would seem that you speak certain words with—shall we say, an alien inflection. Pardon me again—the fault lies with my partial deafness—but I am afraid I did not quite catch your name last evening?”
She told him.
He bent toward her across the slopped breakfast dishes. He was as eager and happy as a child with a bright new toy. That was what he would have put you in mind of—a bearded octogenarian débutante in that pitiable state we call second childhood, but for the moment tremendously uplifted by a disclosure held to be of the utmost importance.
“Why, my dear child,” he said, “you don’t mean to tell me! Where did you get your middle name? Was Lamar, by any chance, your mother’s maiden name.”
She nodded dubiously. As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. But she had not hanged herself; in another minute she was to find that out. She had soundly strengthened herself.
“Then we are related, you and I, my dear. Not closely related, but even so, there is a relationship. I suppose you might say we are very distant cousins. Now—”
“I never was the one to bother much about family.”