“My aunts are Kings Port.”
“The whole of it?”
“If you mean the thirty thousand negroes—”
“No, there are other white people here—there goes your nose again!”
“I will not have you so impudent, sir!”
“A thousand pardons, I’m on my knees. But your aunts—” There was such a flash of war in her eye that I stopped.
“May I not even mention them?” I asked her.
And suddenly upon this she became serious and gentle. “I thought that you understood them. Would you take them from their seclusion, too? It is all they have left—since you burned the rest in 1865.”
I had made her say what I wanted! That “you” was what I wanted. Now I should presently have it out with her. But, for the moment, I did not disclaim the “you.” I said:—
“The burning in 1865 was horrible, but it was war.”