She was still silent.
“If my state seceded from the Union tomorrow, I should side with the Union against her.”
She was frankly astonished now. “Would you really?” And I think some light about me began to reach her. A Northerner willing to side against a Northern state! I was very glad that I had found that phrase to make clear to her my American creed.
I proceeded. “I shall help to hand down all the glories and all the sadnesses; Lee’s, Lincoln’s, everybody’s. But I shall not hand ‘it’ down.”
This checked her.
“It’s easy for me, you know,” I hastily explained. “Nothing noble about it at all. But from noble people”—and I looked hard at her—“one expects, sooner or later, noble things.”
She repressed something she had been going to reply.
“If ever I have children,” I finished, “they shall know ‘Dixie’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’ by heart, and never know the difference. By that time I should think they might have a chance of hearing ‘Yankee Doodle’ in Kings Port.”
Again she checked a rapid retort. “Well,” she, after a pause, repeated, “you have been really quite nice.”
“May I tell you what you have been?”