There was the humor of scorn in her "glad eyes" as she looked up at me. "So, if I am to read your play, it must not be when the typewriter has hammered you out of it," she said.
"I will read it to you. How will that do?"
"From the original sheets? That will do; that is, if you want to. I don't want you to feel that it's a duty."
"Oh, no; it will be a pleasure. The path of duty is too straight for me."
"It's the winding path that leads to the sweetest flowers," she said, with a motion of her hand toward a clump of roses not far away.
There were a hundred points on which I had yearned to question her, and the most vital of them all—why had she taken the name of that unsympathetic man?—arose to my mind, but instantly it sank again. Her manner toward me was cordial and intimate, but in it I recognized a command against familiarity; that quiet something which tells a man more than a volume of words could imply. I wanted to believe that she was persuaded by her father. I was willing to believe almost anything except that she could ever have loved him. It was not alone the eye of prejudice that made him look old; it was actual age. He was older than the Senator. But his people had been great—the lords of old Virginia. I would wait, and perhaps at some time in the future she might forget a high-strung woman's caution; she might drop a thoughtless word, a firefly to glow in the dark.
The negro preacher came walking slowly down the patch, to give his attention to another part of the garden. He was humming a tune, with his eyes on the ground, and he neither spoke nor halted, but at my feet he dropped a weed.
"You have a faithful gardener," I remarked, when Washington had passed beyond the reach of a low tone.
"Yes; there was only one George Washington, and there's only one Washington Smith."
"But don't you think he's a little too zealous?"