It was needless for you to tell your Virginia hostess that "you-all" (meaning you and your friend) were Yankees. The fact that you criticized her language proved it. Southern people pride themselves on their tact, and no doubt, at the time, she was struggling to conceal a smile because of some of your own localisms.
Many of the letters were more severe than this one, and most of them made the point that I had been impolite to my hostess, and that, in all probability, when she looked at me and asked, "Do you-all take sugah?" she was playing a joke upon me, apropos the discussion which had preceded the question. For example, this, from a gentleman of Pell City, Alabama:
My wife is the residuary legatee of Virginia's language, inherited, acquired and affected varieties, including the vanishing y; annihilated g; long-distance a, and irresistible drawl.
To quell the unfortunate tumult that has arisen in our household as a result of your last article in "Collier's" I am commanded to advise you that the use of "you-all" in the singular is absodamnlutely non est factum in Virginia, save, perhaps, among the hill people of the Blue Ridge.
Also, take notice that when your hostess, with apparent inadvertence, used the expression in connection with sugar in your demi-tasse, the subsequent blush was due to your failure to catch her witticism, ignorantly mistaking it for a lapse of hers.
My wife was going to write to you herself, but I managed to divert this cruel determination by promising to uphold the honor of the Old Dominion. There is already too much blood being shed in the world without spilling that of non-combatants as would have been "you-all's" fate had she gone after you with a weapon more mighty than the sword when in the hands of Mr. Wilson or an outraged woman.
In face of all this and much more, however, my conviction was unshaken. I talked it over with my companion. He remembered the episode of the dinner table exactly as I did. Moreover, I still had my notes, made in the hotel that night. The lady looked at me. My companion was several places removed from her at the other side of the table. How could she have meant to include him? And how could she have expected me to say how he took his after-dinner coffee?
At last, to reassure myself, I wrote to the wisest, cleverest, most trustworthy lady in the South, and asked her what it all meant.
"Well," she wrote back from Atlanta, "I will tell you, but I am not sure that you will understand me. The answer is: She did, but she didn't. She looked at and spoke to you and, of course, by all rules of logic she could not have been intending to make you Morg's keeper in the matter of coffee dressing. But she never would have said 'you-all' if Morg had not been in her mind as joined with you. The response, according to her thought-connotation, would have been from you and from him."
This was disconcerting. So was a letter, received in the same mail, from a gentleman in Charleston: