Superintended by Mr. Hamilton, George, the middle-aged Negro chauffeur, was proudly piling the suitcases into the family automobile. He was grinning from ear to ear and remarked repeatedly that “the gen’ral sure do look well” and something about “bein’ mighty scrumptious.” Father and son shook hands briefly, but Margaret held out her arms and drew down Hamilton’s head. It was the first time that he had kissed her in the presence of anybody else, the first time he had kissed any one, outside the family, before his mother and he felt awkward and self-conscious. As he bent down, he noticed the sparkle of emeralds and diamonds in her engagement ring and felt ashamed that he had eyes for anything but Margaret herself. He noted how calmly she could kiss him—not exactly calmly, but self-possessedly and without embarrassment.
With his first glance, too, he saw how beautiful she really was and how strikingly similar her beauty was, in a way, to that of Dorothy. Only it had a quality of naiveté. She looked, if not actually younger in years, younger in spirit. Hers was the naive sophistication of the rising generation—a generation wise in its own conventionalities, the conventionalities of breaking older conventionalities.
It was surprising how her set, among the sons and daughters of the best families in Georgia, could assimilate so readily the spirit of the new freedom, without, at the same time, absorbing its intellectual aspects. Margaret, for instance, knew nothing about political or economic movements save as they came filtered to her through the mind of her parents. The freedom, therefore, was exhibited mainly in the social sphere—in attending dances and parties unchaperoned, in driving her own motor car, in discussing love and sex theories—generally gleaned from motion pictures or printed stories—in dressing more freely than her mother had done, in staying away with increasing frequency from church, in smoking cigarettes surreptitiously and even in drinking away from home—a little.
She had no real discrimination in her choice of either art, literature or cigarettes. She had no favorite schools or intellectual movements. And no theories. She simply liked a picture or a book, or didn’t like it—her emancipation from the old conventionalities expressing itself simply in a frankness in expressing her opinion. Whereas her mother would have admired a painting because she thought that was the thing to do, with Margaret the thing to do was to say you didn’t like it if you didn’t. But her taste for fiction—the only kind of literature she read—was omnivorous. In music, too, her tastes were of contradictory breadth, preferring Beethoven one night and jazz the next. She played the piano. Classical music when there were older visitors, old ballads when alone with her mother, jazz music when in her own set. When there was no one else with her she played the three categories in the order of jazz first, then ballads, and lastly classical music.
Margaret was a joy on a horse and a mermaid in the water and altogether a creditable product of the finishing school which her mother had selected for her. The best testimony to this being the fact that she could have married a half dozen of the most eligible young Corinthians, since her graduation, two years ago in June.
The Hamiltons climbed into the touring car, the returned hero seating himself between his mother and his fiancée, while the father took one of the collapsible seats. The home-coming had not been unseen by a crowd of tatterdemalion colored children, who viewed Captain Hamilton with awe until he disappeared down the street.
Hamilton was conscious of many things and of many emotions: warm sunshine bathing the town and fragrant blooming magnolia trees overarching the road; glimpses of familiar houses; the street down which he had attempted to elope with Margaret; the public school-house where he had been set upon and in which he had triumphed in his last fight of childhood; a magnificent old church which he used to admire profoundly as a boy; homes of old friends. He was conscious of the love and pride of the three with whom he rode and the feeling of possession of Margaret, whose eyes were on him, as much as his mother’s.
“Your wound is quite all right?” asked Mr. Hamilton sitting sidewise in his seat.
“It’s fine,” Hamilton assured him. “Couldn’t be better. I think I could even take the sorrel over the fence.”
“Robert, you wouldn’t do that?” said his mother reprovingly, while his father and Margaret laughed. “Taking the sorrel over the fence” had become a family joke, an expression for extreme recklessness, because shortly before leaving for New York, Robert, on a dare, had actually jumped the stone fence on the sorrel, Annabell Lee. As his father had said at the time, Robert had risked the knees of a very valuable horse and the neck of a very heedless rider.