“Ah, but you would have bothered, as you call it, had you but known. Why, my dear child, you are related to some of the finest and oldest families in the South. Let me tell you who you are.”
They sat there then, she listening and secretly amused at first and on the whole rather pleased with herself, and he all afire with the enthusiasm which the aging so often give to trivialities. While his bacon grew stiffer and his egg grew limper, each according to its own special chemistry, in the nest of their pooled cold greases, he ramified a luxuriant family tree, trunk, branch and twig, dowering her with a vast wealth of kinspeople whose names she knew she never would be able to remember—Waltours, Bullochs, Gordons, Telfairs, Hustouns.
It seemed that among her forbears commonplace persons had found mighty few places. They had been statesmen, educators, railroad builders, gracious belles, warriors, orators, noble mothers, racers of fast horses, owners of broad fertile acres, kindly masters and mistresses of hundreds of black slaves, and their memories were a noble inheritance for her to carry onward with her. Just trying to keep track of the main lines almost made her head ache.
“My dear young lady,” he was saying as they got up together to quit the dining-room, emptied now of all except them, “we must see more of each other while we both are in this strange city. We who are of the old South will never lack for a congenial topic of conversation when we are thrown together. Northerners might not understand it, but you, with the legacy of blood that is in your veins—you will understand. After you, my dear; after you, please.” This was when they had gone as far as the door into the hallway. “And now then,” he was saying, as they passed along the hall, “let me tell you something more about your Grandfather Lamar’s estate and domestic establishment. The house itself I remember very clearly, as a youth. The Yankee general, Sherman, burnt it. It was white with....”
That was the proper beginning of as freakish a companionship as that habitat for curious intimacies and spiteful enmities, Mrs. H. Spicer’s, had ever seen. Of a younger man, of a man who had been indubitable flesh and blood, Tobe Daly might have felt, in a way of speaking, jealous. At least he would have been annoyed that an interloper should all of a sudden come between him and his desires upon this casual little Doll Tearsheet of the theater who called herself Blossom Lamar Clayton. But of a man old enough to be the kid’s grandfather, almost old enough to be her great-grandfather—furthermore a pompous, stilted, stupid, toploftical old dodo who behaved more like something out of one of these old-timey before-the-war novels than a regular honest-to-gracious human being—well, to be jealous of such a man would be just plain downright foolish, that’s all. For Tobe an attitude of contemptuousness appeared to be the indicated mood. So he rode, as the saying goes, the high horse, and only once did he take advantage of a favoring opportunity openly to twit the girl regarding her choice of beaux.
“That will be about all from you,” she snapped at him, using back-stage language. “I’m picking my own friends these days. And you lay off from handing out your little digs at him across the table meal-times. He may not be on to you—he’s too decent and polite himself to suspect anybody else of trying to razz him on the sly—but I’m on. So I’m serving notice on you to quit it because if you don’t, the first thing you know you’ll be in a jam with me. I know how to handle your kind. I was raised that way. I guess it’s a kind of a tip-off on the way I was raised that I had to wait until I met a man who’ll be eighty his next birthday before I met somebody who knows how to treat a girl like she was a lady.”
Tobe, drawing off, flung a parting retort at her.
“Say, kiddo, how did you find out what it feels like to be a lady?”
“I never found out,” she said. “I never knew before. But I’m taking lessons now.”