Peter watched the old virago close the door and then sat down to his breakfast. His anger presently died away, and he sat wondering what could have happened to Rose Hobbett that had corroded her whole existence. Did she enjoy her vituperation, her continual malice? He tried to imagine how she felt.
The breakfast Rose had brought him was delicious: hot biscuits of feathery lightness, three wide slices of ham, a bowl of scrambled eggs, a pot of coffee, some preserved raspberries, and a tiny glass of whisky.
The plate which Captain Renfrew had set before his guest was a delicate dawn pink ringed with a wreath of holly. It was old Worcester porcelain of about the decade of 1760. The coffee-pot was really an old Whieldon teapot in broad cauliflower design. Age and careless heating had given the surface a fine reticulation. His cup and saucer, on the contrary, were thick pieces of ware such as the cabin-boys toss about on steamboats. The whole ceramic mélange told of the fortuities of English colonial and early American life, of the migration of families westward. No doubt, once upon a time, that dawn-pink Worcester had married into a Whieldon cauliflower family. A queer sort of genealogy might be traced among Southern families through their mixtures of tableware.
As Peter mused over these implications of long ancestral lines, it reminded him that he had none. Over his own past, over the lineage of nearly every negro in the South, hung a curtain. Even the names of the colored folk meant nothing, and gave no hint of their kin and clan. At the end of the war between the States, Peter's people had selected names for themselves, casually, as children pick up a pretty stone. They meant nothing. It occurred to Peter for the first time, as he sat looking at the chinaware, that he knew nothing about himself; whether his kinsmen were valiant or recreant he did not know. Even his own father he knew little about except that his mother had said his name was Peter, like his own, and that he had gone down the river on a tie boat and was drowned.
A faint sound attracted Peter's attention. He looked out at his open window and saw old Rose making off the back way with something concealed under her petticoat. Peter knew it was the unused ham and biscuits that she had cooked. For once the old negress hurried along without railing at the world. She moved with a silent, but, in a way, self-respecting, flight. Peter could see by the tilt of her head and the set of her shoulders that not only did her spoil gratify her enmity to mankind in general and the Captain in particular, but she was well within her rights in her acquisition. She disappeared around a syringa bush, and was heard no more until she reappeared to cook the noon meal, as vitriolic as ever.
When Peter entered the library, old Captain Renfrew greeted him with morning wishes, thus sustaining the fiction that they had not seen each other before, that morning.
The old gentleman seemed pleased but somewhat excited over his new secretary. He moved some of his books aimlessly from one table to another, placed them in exact piles as if he were just about to plunge into heroic labor, and could not give time to such details once he had begun.
As he arranged his books just so, he cleared his throat.
"Now, Peter, we want to get down to this," he announced dynamically; "do this thing, shove this work out!" He started with tottery briskness around to his manuscript drawer, but veered off to the left to aline some magazines. "System, Peter, system. Without system one may well be hopeless of performing any great literary labor; but with system, the constant piling up of brick on brick, stone on stone—it's the way Rome was built, my boy."