“Surely not, my dear young lady.”
“But he's been saying that awtusts are just as greedy aboat money as anybody,” said his daughter.
“The law of commercialism is on everything in a commercial society,” the Colonel explained, softening the tone in which his convictions were presented. “The final reward of art is money, and not the pleasure of creating.”
“Perhaps they would be willing to take it all oat in that if othah people would let them pay their bills in the pleasure of creating,” his daughter teased.
“They are helpless, like all the rest,” said her father, with the same deference to her as to other women. “I do not blame them.”
“Oh, mah goodness! Didn't you say, sir, that Mr. Beaton had bad manners?”
Alma relieved a confusion which he seemed to feel in reference to her. “Bad manners? He has no manners! That is, when he's himself. He has pretty good ones when he's somebody else.”
Miss Woodburn began, “Oh, mah—” and then stopped herself. Alma's mother looked at her with distressed question, but the girl seemed perfectly cool and contented; and she gave her mind provisionally to a point suggested by Colonel Woodburn's talk.
“Still, I can't believe it was right to hold people in slavery, to whip them and sell them. It never did seem right to me,” she added, in apology for her extreme sentiments to the gentleness of her adversary.
“I quite agree with you, madam,” said the Colonel. “Those were the abuses of the institution. But if we had not been vitiated on the one hand and threatened on the other by the spirit of commercialism from the North—and from Europe, too—those abuses could have been eliminated, and the institution developed in the direction of the mild patriarchalism of the divine intention.” The Colonel hitched his chair, which figured a hobby careering upon its hind legs, a little toward Mrs. Leighton and the girls approached their heads and began to whisper; they fell deferentially silent when the Colonel paused in his argument, and went on again when he went on.