When the fish course was served, he said to his host:
“Judge, I’d like to have some rice with this fish.”
“Did you hear the judge?” was asked the negro butler by the host.
The man gave a certain look at his master, then one of extreme annoyance at the guest. Leaning over, he whispered distinctly in the ear of the up-country judge:
“We don’t serve rice with fish in Charleston.”
The inner life of this Huguenot city is little known to the public, because Charleston won’t have it known. The same exclusiveness and privacy pervade her social and domestic system in the beginning of the twentieth as in the eighteenth century.
No detailed description of this feeling could so firmly fix it in the mind of the stranger as a remark made by a member of one of the oldest families in the city. When a certain history of the Revolution was published, it had a chapter on the part played in it by men of South Carolina. Included in this was an intimate description of the bravery of a Charleston general. An ancestor of this man wrote at once to the publisher:
“You will be so kind as to leave out in your next edition all allusions to my ancestor, General ——. What he did in the Revolution is a purely private and family matter, and we do not wish it boldly displayed for the public to read.”
In the next edition of the book the career of the Charlestonian was left out!
This pride, however, works in another way. The well-born Charlestonian expects the world to know who he is and whence he sprang.