"Married! Clélie!" said my mother, in consternation. "Do you mean to tell me you're planning to leave me, at this time of our lives?"
Clélie was indignant. "You think I have no mo'sense than to leave you and M'sieu Armand, for some strange nigger? Not me!"
"Who are you going to marry, Clélie?" Mary Virginia was delighted. "And hadn't you better let me give you another frock? Black is hardly appropriate for a bride."
"I'm not exactly set in my mind who he's going to be yet, Miss Mary Virginia, but he's got to be somebody or other. There's been lots after me, since it got out I'm such a grand cook and save my wages. But I've got a sort of taste for Daddy January. He's old, but he's lively. He's a real ambitious old man like that. Besides, I'm sure of his family,—I always did like Judge Mayne and Mister Laurence, and I do like 'ristocratic connections, Miss Mary Virginia. That big nigger that drives one of the mill trucks had the impudence to tell me he'd give me a church wedding and pay for it himself, but I told him I was raised a Catholic; and what you think he said? He said, 'Oh, well, you've been christened in the face already. We can dip the rest of you easy enough, and then you'll be a real Christian, like me!' I'd just scalded my chickens and was picking them, and I was that mad I upped and let him have that dish pan full of hot water and wet feathers in his face. 'There,' says I, 'you're christened in the face now yourself,' I says. 'You can go and dip the rest of yourself,' says I, 'but see you do it somewhere else besides my kitchen,' I says. I don't think he's crazy to marry me any more, and Daddy January's sort of soothing to my feelings, besides being close to hand. Yes'm, I guess you'd better give me the black dress, Miss Mary Virginia, if you don't mind: it'd come in awful handy if I had to go in mourning."
"The black dress it shall be," said Mary Virginia, gaily. She turned to my mother. "And what do you think, p'tite Madame? I've a rare butterfly for John Flint, that an English duke gave me for him! The duke is a collector, too, and he'd gotten some specimens from John Flint. The minute he learned I was from Appleboro he asked me all about him. He said nobody else under the sky can 'do' insects so perfectly, and that nobody except the Lord and old Henri Fabre knew as much about certain of them as John Flint does. Folks thought the duke was taken up with me, of course, and I was no end conceited! I hadn't the ghost of an idea you and John Flint were such astonishingly learned folks, Padre! But of course if a duke thought so, I knew I'd better think so, too—and so I did and do! Think of a duke knowing about folks in little Appleboro! And he was such a nice old man, too. Not a bit dukey, after you knew him!"
"We come in touch with collectors everywhere," I explained.
"And so John Flint has written some sort of a book, describing the whole life history of something or other, and you've done all the drawings! Isn't it lovely? Why, it sounds like something out of a pleasant book. Mayn't I see collector and collection in the morning? And oh, where's Kerry?"
"Kerry," said my mother gravely, "is a most important personage. He's John Flint's bodyguard. He doesn't actually sleep in his master's bed, because he has one of his own right next it. Clélie was horrified at first. She said they'd be eating together next, but the Butterfly Man reminded her that Kerry likes dog-biscuit and he doesn't. I figure that in the order of his affections the Butterfly Man ranks Kerry first, Armand and myself next, and Laurence a close third."
"Oh, Laurence," said Mary Virginia. "I'll be so glad to see Laurence again, if only to quarrel with him. Is he just as logical as ever? Has he given the sun a black eye with his sling-shot? My father's always praising Laurence in his letters."
Now my mother adores Laurence. She patterns upon this model every young man she meets, and if they are not Laurence-sized she does not include them in her good graces. But she seldom lifts her voice in praise of her favorite. She is far, far too wise.