"Not as mooch as I thart it would,—and I thart it wouldn't," added Paddy pessimistically.
In the first place, Mr. Pore was handsome. He had a stately dignity and an aristocratic bearing that all the weighing of lard and drawing of molasses in the world could not lessen. His forehead was intellectual; his eyes piercing; his nose aquiline and rather haughty; his mouth a little petulant with a pathetic droop at the corners; and his chin (rather indicative of his character, I fancy, and explaining why he was keeping a country store at Price's Landing instead of taking that place in the world to which by birth and education he was entitled), his chin decidedly receded. In doing so, however, it gave you to understand that it retreated in good order and was unconvinced. I mean that it had that stubborn look that receding chins sometimes do have. After all, stubbornness was the key-note of Mr. Pore's character, rather than weakness. I had gathered that much from what Annie had divulged to me that night at Gresham when she had opened the box with her dead mother's dress in it and found the note from her mother, with the twenty-five dollars pinned in the sleeve.
He was dressed in what books call decent black. Certainly there was nothing about him to make anyone doubt he was a perfect gentleman, even had they been unaware of the fact that only one life stood between him and a title. He was so excessively English that it was hard to believe that he had spent the last fifteen years in a little settlement on the James River, never hearing his native tongue in all that time, perhaps. Our spoken language was very different from his, although I have heard it said that Virginians and Kentuckians and Bostonians come nearer to speaking the real English than any other Americans. We may come nearer than others but we are still far off from the kind of English that Mr. Arthur Ponsonby Pore spoke. I thought of Cousin Park and her "lower middle class" to which she had consigned the gentleman, and wished that he might just once look at her and Mabel through the gold pince nez that straddled his aristocratic, aquiline nose!
Zebedee had gone over to Norfolk to meet his guest, and under his genial influence I fancy Mr. Pore had somewhat melted; but his demeanor was still rather icy. He went through the introduction to Miss Cox and all of us girls as though it had been a court ceremony, and then turning to Annie, he gave her a little Arthur Ponsonby peck in lieu of a kiss. Shaking his hand, Dee declared was like grasping an old pump handle when the sucker is worn out. You take hold thinking you are to meet with some resistance, but instead, the handle flies up and you find yourself foolishly shaking it up and down with no chance of getting any returns for your trouble. The Tuckers were famous hand-shakers, as all their friends knew, but doubtless Mr. Pore was unprepared for such a vigorous grasp from young ladies.
I found nothing to complain of in his manner of greeting me. Not being such a hearty hand-shaker as Tweedles, I put my hand in his and left him to do the shaking. This he did not do, but he gave my hand a slight pressure and gazed earnestly into my eyes. So earnest and burning was his glance that I felt almost confused, but I thought that no doubt Annie had told him of her confiding in me about her birth and he felt some interest because of her affection for me.
As we took our seats on the porch, Mr. Pore's chair was by mine and still he gazed at me with his piercing, melancholy eyes.
"Did I hear your name aright? Was it not Miss Page Allison?"
"Yes, sir! I am Annie's friend from Gresham. We have been intimate from the day we entered school."
"Yes, yes! I know much of you and your courtesy. But tell me, Miss Allison, are you American?" (His American was so different from ours one could almost spell it A-m-e-h-r-i-k-e-n.)
"Yes, Mr. Pore, I am American, but my mother was English."