When young Blount paid his next visit Durgan was in a mood better to appreciate his budget of gossip. He even contributed to it.
Adam had beaten his wife, and with good cause. Durgan had himself seen a strange nigger eating Adam's dinner, waited upon by Adam's wife. He found time to explain to his interested cousin that the nigger was both sickly and flashy—a mulatto, consumptive and dandified.
"The worst sort of trash. What could have brought him here? There is no such fellow belonging to the county, I'll swear."
"Adam's wife is not Eve, after all, I think. She can only be Lilith; and I wish the fates would change her for a superior." Durgan spoke musingly.
"At least I hope she'll have more sense than to take a tramping scamp nigger like that to the summit house," said Blount. "He's sure to be a thief."
"I'd chastise her myself if she did," said Durgan, smoking lazily.
"Ah, I'm glad you feel that way, for those ladies are a real benefit to the neighborhood, and, to tell the truth, it was on their account I came to you now. The General sent me."
Durgan smoked on. They were sitting late at the door of the hut. Darkness was falling like a mantle over all that lay below their precipice.
Blount began again. "These ladies from the North can't realize how little our mountain whites know of class distinctions. If you have only seen one thing, how can you appreciate the difference between that and another? The mountain men have lived in these hills for generations, knowing only themselves. You have to be born and bred in the brier bush to understand their ignorance and the self-importance that underlies their passive behavior."
"So I have heard."