"Why, Edwin, you have seen both of them several times since we arrived."
"Yes, but the subject of our conversation was such that it did not seem an appropriate time to broach the matter of board."
All of us laughed at our masculine contingent's being as bad as we had been, and I felt more secure than ever that father would get his Timrod and I would own a volume of J. Gordon Coogler.
Dilsey, the corn-field hand, almost fell down the steps announcing supper. Of course we were hungry, and even though the garden was so lovely we were glad to go to supper. We hoped its loveliness would keep, and we knew that food could not be trusted to.
The ladies of the house were dressed in stiff grosgrain silk. Mrs. Green knew the name of the kind of silk; we had never seen it before. She said she had an Aunt Clay in Kentucky who wore it on state occasions. They did not look nearly so funereal, as they had bits of fine old lace in necks and sleeves. Lace is a wonderful fabric for lightening up sombreness. It can cheer up dripping black.
It seems that I was wrong about the Misses Laurens having suffered recent bereavement. They had the mourning habit. Claire Gaillard had told us that they had had no deaths in the family for at least ten years, but that they always wore mourning, poor old things. When we met them in the bus, the morning of our arrival, they were not coming from the funeral of a relative who had not left them the legacy they had been counting on, as I had made up about them; on the contrary, they were coming from the wedding of a young cousin in a neighboring town. So the would-be author fell down that time in her surmises. Surely persons who expect to figure in plots of stories have no business looking as though they were coming from funerals when they have been to weddings. It is hard on real authors to have to contend with such contrariness, and simply impossible for would-bes.
The dining-room was even lovelier than the parlor. The walls were papered with a hunting scene that had faded very little, considering it must have been there half a century. It was a peculiar paper that seemed to have been varnished, no doubt thus preserving it.
The sideboard was worth a king's ransom, whatever that is. It was not the eternal Colonial that is of course beautiful, but it has come to the pass that Americans think there is no other style worth considering. It was very old Florentine, as were also the chairs and table. The carving on the sideboard could only be equalled by the Cimabue gates, I am sure. The chairs were upholstered in deep red Genoese velvet. It seems a remote Huguenot ancestor had been United States Consul in Florence and had brought home with him this dining-room furniture. There were no pictures in this room, as with paper of that type pictures are out of place, but polychrome sconces were hung at intervals, half a dozen in all. The candles in them were not lighted, as it was still daylight, and a great silver candelabrum on the table gave what additional light was needed.
The table was set with the finest Sevres china, cobweb mats and thin old teaspoons that looked a little like the old ladies themselves. The forks, however, were as big as two ordinary forks of the day; so big in fact that one might have been forgiven if, like Sam Weller, he "handled his wittles with cold steel."
Miss Judith looked flushed, and I was afraid she had been cooking the supper herself, while Miss Arabella had on a fresh thumb-stall that suggested a possible burn on her thin, blue-veined old hand. Supper consisted of fried chicken, hot rolls, four kinds of preserves, the inevitable rice that is served twice a day in South Carolina, as though to encourage home industries, and gravy, of course, to go on the rice, another thing that is the rule in the best families, so I have been told.