“It was hard—”
Charley rose and walked up and down the room three or four times.
“It was hard to lose such a boy as that!”
Alice was silent.
“His love for his mother was his religion. And this brings me to the sad part of my story.
“We Virginians are in the habit of denouncing New England puritanism; unaware, seemingly, that Virginia numbers among her people thousands of puritans.”
Alice looked up, but said nothing.
“And how could it have been otherwise? Are not we, equally with the New Englanders, English? But, as the people who came over in the ‘Mayflower’ belonged to a different class of English society from those who sailed with Captain John Smith” (Charley stopped speaking for a moment, then went on), “our puritanism has assumed a shape so different from that of Massachusetts, that we have failed to recognize it. The aristocratic element of our colonists was so strong and numerous, that it gave a tone to our society which it has never lost. And it is because the maxim that an Englishman’s house is his castle has, among people of a certain social standing, a meaning far wider than its merely legal one, that puritanism never became blatant with us. Hence, though it exists among us,—often in the most intense form,—we have ignored it.”
Alice shook her head, slowly: “I can’t make out what you mean.”
“Well, then, to come to concrete examples,—Mr. Poythress.”