CHAPTER V
QUALITY FOLKS
IN our town formerly there were any number of negro children named for Caucasian friends of their parents. Some bore for their names the names of old masters of the slavery time, masters who had been kindly and gracious and whose memories thereby were affectionately perpetuated; these were mainly of a generation now growing into middle age. Others—I am speaking still of the namesakes, not of the original bearers of the names—had been christened with intent to do honour to indulgent and well-remembered employers of post-bellum days. Thus it might befall, for example, that Wadsworth Junius Courtney, Esquire, would be a prominent advocate practicing at the local bar and that Wadsworth Junius Courtney Jones, of colour, would be his janitor and sweep out his office for him. Yet others had been named after white children—and soon after—for the reason that the white children had been given first names having a fine, full, sonorous sound or else a fascinatingly novel sound.
Of these last there were instances amounting in the aggregate to a small host.
I seem to remember, for example, that once a pink girl-mite came into the world by way of a bedroom in a large white house on Tilghman Avenue and was at the baptismal font sentenced for life to bear the Christian name of Rowena Hildegarde.
Or is Rowena Hildegarde a Christian name?
At any rate, within twelve months' time, there were to be found in more crowded and less affluent quarters of our thriving little city four more Rowena Hildegardes, of tender years, or rather, tender months—two black ones, one chrome-yellow one, and one sepia-brown one.
But so far as the available records show there was but one white child in our town who bore for its name, bestowed upon it with due knowledge of the fact and with deliberate intent, the name of a person of undoubted African descent. However, at this stage to reveal the circumstances governing this phenomenon would be to run ahead of our tale and to precipitate its climax before the groundwork were laid for its premise. Most stories should start at the beginning. This one must.
From round the left-hand corner of the house came with a sudden blare the sound of melody—words and music—growing steadily louder as the unseen singer drew nearer. The music was a lusty, deep-volumed camp-meeting air, with long-drawn quavers and cadences in it. The words were as follows:
Had a lovin' mother,
Been climbin' up de hill so long;
She been hopin' git to heaben in due time
Befo' dem heaben do's close!
And then the chorus, voicing first a passionate entreaty, then rising in the final bars to a great exultant shout:
Den chain dat lion down, Good Lawd!
Den chain dat lion down!
Oh, please!
Good Lawd, done chained dat lion down!
Done chained dat deadly lion down!
Glor-e-e-e!
The singer, still singing, issued into view, limping slightly—a wizen woman, coal-black and old, with a white cloth bound about her head, turban fashion, and a man's battered straw hat resting jauntily upon the knotted kerchief. Her calico frock was voluminous, unshapely and starch-clean. Her under lip was shoved forward as though permanently twisted into a spout-shape by the task of holding something against the gums of her lower front teeth, and from one side of her mouth protruded a bit of wood with the slivered bark on it. One versed in the science of forestry might have recognised the little stub of switch as a peach-tree switch; one bred of the soil would have known its purpose. Neither puckered-out lip nor peach-tree twig seemed to interfere in the least with her singing. She flung the song out past them—over the lip, round the twig.
With her head thrown away back, her hands resting on her bony hips, and her feet clunking inside a pair of boys' shoes too large for her, she crossed the lawn at an angle. In all things about her—in her gait, despite its limp, in her pose, her figure—there was something masterful, something dominating, something tremendously proud. Considering her sparseness of bulk she had a most astoundingly big strong voice, and in the voice as in the strut was arrogant pride.
She crossed the yard and let herself out of a side gate opening upon an empty side street and went out of sight and ultimately out of hearing down the side street in the hot sunshine of the late afternoon. But before she was out of hearing she had made it plain that not only a loving mother and a loving father, but likewise a loving brother and a loving sister, a loving nephew and a loving uncle, a loving grandmother and divers other loving relatives—had all been engaged in the hill-climbing pilgrimage along a lion-guarded path.
The hush that succeeded her departure was a profound hush; indeed, by comparison with the clamorous outburst that had gone before it seemed almost ghastly. Not even the shrieks of the caucusing blue jays that might now be heard in the oak trees upon the lawn, where they were holding one of their excited powwows, served to destroy the illusion that a dead quiet had descended upon a spot lately racked by loud sounds. The well-dressed young man who had been listening with the air of one intent on catching and memorising the air, settled back in the hammock in which he was stretched behind the thick screen of vines that covered the wide front porch of the house.
"The estimable Aunt Charlotte appears to be in excellent voice and spirits to-day," he said with a wry smile. "I don't know that I ever heard her when her top notes carried farther than they did just now."
The slender black-haired girl who sat alongside him in a porch chair winced.
"It's perfectly awful—I know it," she lamented. "I suppose if Mildred and I have asked her once not to carry on like that here at the front of the house we've asked her a hundred times. It's bad enough to have her whooping like a wild Indian in the kitchen. But it never seems to do any good."
"Why don't you try getting rid of her altogether as a remedy?" suggested the young man.
"Get rid of Aunt Sharley! Why, Harvey—why, Mr. Winslow, I mean—we couldn't do that! Why, Aunt Sharley has always been in our family! Why, she's just like one of us—just like our own flesh and blood! Why, she used to belong to my Grandmother Helm before the war–"
"I see," he said dryly, breaking in on her. "She used to belong to your grandmother, and now you belong to her. The plan of ownership has merely been reversed, that's all. Tell me, Miss Emmy Lou, how does it feel to be a human chattel, with no prospect of emancipation?" Then catching the hurt look on her flushed face he dropped his raillery and hastened to make amends. "Well, never mind. You're the sweetest slave girl I ever met—I guess you're the sweetest one that ever lived. Besides, she's gone—probably won't be back for half an hour or so. Don't hitch your chair away from me—I've got something very important that I want to tell you—in confidence. It concerns you—and somebody else. It concerns me and somebody else—and yet only two persons are concerned in it."
He was wrong about the time, however, truthful as he may have been in asserting his desire to deal confidentially with important topics. Inside of ten minutes, which to him seemed no more than a minute, seeing that he was in love and time always speeds fast for a lover with his sweetheart, the old black woman came hurrying back up the side street, and turned in at the side gate and retraversed the lawn to the back of the old house, giving the vine-screened porch a swift searching look as she hobbled past its corner.
Her curiosity, if so this scrutiny was to be interpreted, carried her further. In a minute or two she suddenly poked her head out through the open front door. She had removed her damaged straw headgear, but still wore her kerchief. Hastily and guiltily the young man released his hold upon a slim white hand which somehow had found its way inside his own. The sharp eyes of the old negress snapped. She gave a grunt as she withdrew her head. It was speedily to develop, though, that she had not entirely betaken herself away. Almost immediately there came to the ears of the couple the creak-creak of a rocking-chair just inside the hall, but out of view from their end of the porch.
"Make the old beldam go away, won't you?" whispered the man.
"I'll try," she whispered back rather nervously. Then, raising her voice, she called out in slightly strained, somewhat artificial voice, which to the understanding of the annoyed young man in the hammock appeared to have almost a suggestion of apprehension in it:
"Is—is that you, Aunt Sharley?"
The answer was little more than a grunt.
"Well, Aunt Sharley, hadn't you better be seeing about supper?"
"Num'mine 'bout supper. Ise tendin' to de supper. Ise bound de supper'll be ready 'fo' you two chillens is ready fur to eat it."
Within, the chair continued to creak steadily.
The girl spread out her hands with a gesture of helplessness.
"You see how it is," she explained under her breath. "Auntie is so set in her ways!"
"And she's so set in that rocking-chair too," he retorted grimly. Saying what he said next, he continued to whisper, but in his whisper was a suggestion of the proprietorial tone. Also for the first time in his life he addressed her without the prefix of Miss before her name. This affair plainly was progressing rapidly, despite the handicaps of a withered black duenna in the immediate offing.
"Emmy Lou," he said, "please try again. Go in there yourself and speak to her. Be firm with her—for once. Make her get away from that door. She makes me nervous. Don't be afraid of the old nuisance. This is your house, isn't it—yours and your sister's? Well, then, I thought Southerners knew how to handle darkies. If you can handle this one, suppose you give me a small proof of the fact—right now!"
Reluctantly, as though knowing beforehand what the outcome would be, Emmy Lou stood up, revealing herself as a straight dainty figure in white. She entered the door. Outside in the hammock Harvey strained his ears to hear the dialogue. His sweetheart's voice came to him only in a series of murmurs, but for him there was no difficulty about distinguishing the replies, for the replies were pitched in a strident, belligerent key which carried almost to the yard fence. From them he was able to guess with the utmost accuracy just what arguments against the presence of the negress the girl was making. This, then, was what he heard:
". . . Now, Mizz Emmy Lou, you mout jes' ez well hush up an' save yore breath. You knows an' I knows, even ef he don't know it, dat 'tain't proper fur no young man to be cotein' a young lady right out on a front po'ch widout no chaperoner bein' clost by. Quality folks don't do sech ez dat. Dat's why I taken my feet in my hand an' come hurryin' back yere f'um dat grocery sto' where I'd done went to git a bottle of lemon extractors. I seen yore sister settin' in dat Mistah B. Weil's candy sto', drinkin' ice-cream sody wid a passel of young folks, an' by dat I realise' I'd done lef' you 'lone in dis house wid a young man dat's a stranger yere, an' so I come right back. And yere I is, honey, and yere I stays. . . . Whut's dat you sayin'? De gen'l'man objec's? He do, do he?" The far-carrying voice rose shrilly and scornfully. "Well, let him! Dat's his privilege. Jes' let him keep on objectin' long ez he's a mind to. 'Tain't gwine 'fluence me none. . . . I don't keer none ef he do heah me. Mebbe it mout do him some good ef he do heah me. Hit'll do him good, too, ef he heed me, I lay to dat. Mebbe he ain't been raised de way we is down yere. Ef so, dat's his misfortune." The voice changed. "Whut would yore pore daid mother say ef she knowed I wuz neglectin' my plain duty to you two lone chillen? Think I gwine run ary chancet of havin' you two gals talked about by all de low-down pore w'ite trash scandalisers in dis town? Well, I ain't, an' dat's flat. No, sir-ree, honey! You mout jes' ez well run 'long back out dere on dat front po'ch, 'ca'se I'm tellin' you I ain't gwine stir nary inch f'um whar I is twell yore sister git back yere."
Beaten and discomfited, with one hand up to a burning cheek, Emmy Lou returned to her young man. On his face was a queer smile.
"Did—did you hear what she said?" she asked, bending over him.
"Not being deaf I couldn't well help hearing. I imagine the people next door heard it, too, and are no doubt now enjoying the joke of it."
"Oh, I know she's impossible," admitted Emmy Lou, repeating her lament of a little while before, but taking care even in her mortification to keep her voice discreetly down. "There's no use trying to do anything with her. We've tried and tried and tried, but she just will have her way. She doesn't seem to understand that we've grown up—Mildred and I. She still wants to boss us just as she did when we were children. And she grows more crotchety and more exacting every day."
"And I—poor benighted Yank that I am—came down here filled with a great and burning sympathy for the down-trodden African." Harvey said this as though speaking to himself.
The girl forgot her annoyance in her instinct to come to the defence of her black mentor.
"Oh, but she has been like a mother to us! After mamma died I don't know what we should have done—two girls left alone in this old house—if it hadn't been for Aunt Sharley. She petted us, she protected us, she nursed us when we were sick. Why, Harvey, she couldn't have been more loyal or more devoted or more self-sacrificing than she has been through all these years while we were growing up. I know she loves us with every drop of blood in her veins. I know she'd work her fingers to the bone for us—that she'd die in her tracks fighting for us. We try to remember the debt of gratitude we owe her now that she's getting old and fussy and unreasonable and all crippled with rheumatism."
She paused, and then, womanlike, she added a qualifying clause: "But I must admit she's terribly aggravating at times. It's almost unbearable to have her playing the noisy old tyrant day in and day out. I get awfully out of patience with her."
Over on Franklin Street the town clock struck.
"Six o'clock," said Harvey. Reluctantly he stirred and sat up in the hammock and reached for his hat.
"I could be induced, you know, if sufficiently pressed, to stay on for supper," he hinted. For one Northern born, young Mr. Harvey Winslow was fast learning the hospitable customs of the town of his recent adoption.
"I'd love to have you stay," stated Emmy Lou, "but—but"—she glanced over her shoulder toward the open door—"but I'm afraid of Auntie. She might say she wasn't prepared to entertain a visitor—'not fixed fur company' is the way she would put it. You see, she regards you as a person of great importance. That's why she's putting on so many airs now. If it was one of the home boys that I've known always that was here with me she wouldn't mind it a bit. But with you it's different, and she's on her dignity—riding her high horse. You aren't very much disappointed, are you? Besides, you're coming to supper to-morrow night. She'll fuss over you then, I know, and be on tiptoe to see that everything is just exactly right. I think Auntie likes you."
"Curious way she has of showing it then," said Harvey. "I guess I still have a good deal to learn about the quaint and interesting tribal customs of this country. Even so, my education is progressing by leaps and bounds—I can see that."
After further remarks delivered in a confidential undertone, the purport of which is none of our business, young Mr. Winslow took his departure from the Dabney homestead. Simultaneously the vigilant warder abandoned her post in the front hall and returned to her special domain at the back of the house. Left alone, the girl sat on the porch with her troubled face cupped in her hands and a furrow of perplexity spoiling her smooth white brow. Presently the gate latch clicked and her sister, a year and a half her junior, came up the walk. With half an eye anyone would have known them for sisters. They looked alike, which is another way of saying both of them were pretty and slim and quick in their movements.
"Hello, sis," said Mildred by way of greeting. She dropped into a chair, smoothing down the front of her white middy blouse and fanning her flushed face with the broad ends of her sailor tie. Then observing her sister's despondent attitude: "What are you in the dumps about? Has that new beau of yours turned out a disappointment? Or what?"
In a passionate little burst Emmy Lou's simmering indignation boiled up and overflowed.
"Oh, it's Aunt Sharley again! Honestly, Mil, she was absolutely unbearable this evening. It was bad enough to have her go stalking across the lawn with that old snuff stick of hers stuck in the corner of her mouth, and singing that terrible song of hers at the very top of her lungs and wearing that scandalous old straw hat stuck up on her topknot—that was bad enough, goodness knows! I don't know what sort of people Har—Mr. Winslow thinks we must be! But that was only the beginning."
Followed a recapitulation of the greater grievance against the absent offender. Before Emmy Lou was done baring the burden of her complaint Mildred's lips had tightened in angered sympathy.
"It must have been just perfectly awfully horrible, Em," she said with a characteristic prodigality of adjectives when the other had finished her recital. "You just ought to give Aunt Sharley a piece of your mind about the way she behaves. And the worst of it is she gets worse all the time. Don't you think you're the only one she picks on. Why, don't you remember, Em, how just here only the other day she jumped on me because I went on the moonlight excursion aboard the Sophie K. Foster with Sidney Baumann?—told me right to my face I ought to be spanked and put to bed for daring to run round with 'codfish aristocracy'—the very words she used. What right has she, I want to know, to be criticising Sidney Baumann's people? I'm sure he's as nice a boy as there is in this whole town; seems to me he deserves all the more credit for working his way up among the old families the way he has. I don't care if his father was a nobody in this town when he first came here.
"Quality folks—quality folks! She's always preaching about our being quality folks and about it being wrong for us to demean ourselves by going with anybody who isn't quality folks until I'm sick and tired of the words. She has quality folks on the brain! Does she think we are still babies? You're nearly twenty-three and I'm past twenty-one. We have our own lives to live. Why should we be so–"
She broke off at the sound of a limping footstep in the hall.
"Supper's ready," announced Aunt Sharley briefly. "You chillen come right in an' eat it whilst it's hot."
Strangely quiet, the two sisters followed the old negress back to the dining room. Aunt Sharley, who had prepared the meal, now waited upon them. She was glumly silent herself, but occasionally she broke, or rather she punctuated, the silence with little sniffs of displeasure. Only once did she speak, and this was at the end of the supper, when she had served them with blackberries and cream.
"Seem lak de cat done got ever'body's tongue round dis place to-night!" she snapped, addressing the blank wall above the older girl's head. "Well, 'tain't no use fur nobody to be poutin' an' sullin'. 'Tain't gwine do 'em no good. 'Tain't gwine budge me nary hair's brea'th frum whut I considers to be my plain duty. Ef folkses don't lak it so much de wuss fur dem, present company not excepted. Dat's my say an' I done said it!"
And out of the room she marched with her head held defiantly high.
That night there were callers. At the Dabney home there nearly always were callers of an evening, for the two sisters were by way of being what small-town society writers call reigning belles. Once, when they had first returned from finishing school the year before, a neighbouring lady, meeting Aunt Sharley on the street, had been moved to ask whether the girls had many beaus, and Aunt Sharley, with a boastful flirt of her under lip which made her side face look something like the profile of a withered but vainglorious dromedary, had answered back:
"Beaus? Huh! Dem chillens is got beaus frum ever' state!" Which was a slight overstretching of the real facts, but a perfectly pardonable and proper exaggeration in Aunt Charlotte's estimation. At home she might make herself a common scold, might be pestiferously officious and more than pestiferously noisy. Abroad her worshipful pride in, and her affection for, the pair she had reared shone through her old black face as though a lamp of many candle power burned within her. She might chide them at will, and she did, holding this to be her prerogative and her right, but whosoever spoke slightingly of either of them in her presence, be the speaker black or white, had Aunt Charlotte to fight right there on the spot; she was as ready with her fists and her teeth to assert the right of her white wards to immunity from criticism as she was with her tongue lashings.
These things were all taken into consideration when Emmy Lou and Mildred came that night to balance the account for and against the old woman—so many, many deeds of thoughtfulness, of kindness, of tenderness on the credit side; so many flagrant faults, so many shortcomings of temper and behaviour on the debit page. The last caller had gone. Aunt Sharley, after making the rounds of the house to see to door boltings and window latchings, had hobbled upstairs to her own sleeping quarters over the kitchen wing, and in the elder sister's room, with the lights turned low, the two of them sat in their nightgowns on the side of Emmy Lou's bed and tried the case of Spinster Charlotte Helm, coloured, in the scales of their own youthful judgments. Without exactly being able to express the situation in words, both realised that a condition which verged upon the intolerable was fast approaching its climax.
Along with the impatience of youth and the thought of many grievances they had within them a natural instinct for fairness; a legacy perhaps from a father who had been just and a mother who had been mercifully kind and gentle. First one would play the part of devil's advocate, the while the other defended the accused, and then at the remembrance of some one of a long record of things done or said by Aunt Sharley those attitudes would be reversed.
There were times when both condemned the defendant, their hair braids bobbing in emphasis of the intensity of their feelings; times when together they conjured up recollections of the everlasting debt that they owed her for her manifold goodnesses, her countless sacrifices on behalf of them. The average Northerner, of whatsoever social status, would have been hard put to it either to comprehend the true inwardness of the relationship that existed between these girls of one race and this old woman of another or to figure how there could be but one outcome. The average Southerner would have been able at once to sense the sentiments and the prejudices underlying the dilemma that now confronted the orphaned pair, and to sympathise with them, and with the old negress too.
To begin with, there were the fine things to be said for Aunt Charlotte; the arguments in her behalf—a splendid long golden list of them stretching back to their babyhood and beyond, binding them with ties stronger almost than blood ties to this faithful, loving, cantankerous, crotchety old soul. Aunt Charlotte had been born in servitude, the possession of their mother's mother. She had been their mother's handmaiden before their mother's marriage. Afterward she had been their own nurse, cradling them in babyhood on her black breast, spoiling them, training them, ruling them, overruling them, too, coddling them when they were good, nursing them when they were ailing, scolding them and punishing them when they misbehaved.
After their father's death their mother, then an invalid, had advised as frequently with Aunt Sharley regarding the rearing of the two daughters as with the guardians who had been named in her husband's will—and with as satisfactory results. Before his death their father had urged his wife to counsel with Aunt Sharley in all domestic emergencies. Dying, he had signified his affectionate regard for the black woman by leaving her a little cottage with its two acres of domain near the railroad tracks. Regardless though of the fact that she was now a landed proprietor and thereby exalted before the eyes of her own race, Aunt Sharley had elected to go right on living beneath the Dabney roof. In the latter years of Mrs. Dabney's life she had been to all intents a copartner in the running of the house, and after that sweet lady's death she had been its manager in all regards. In the simple economies of the house she had indeed been all things for these past few years—housekeeper, cook, housemaid, even seamstress, for in addition to being a poetess with a cook-stove she was a wizard with a needle.
As they looked back now, casting up the tally of the remembered years, neither Emmy Lou nor Mildred could recall an event in all their lives in which the half-savage, half-childish, altogether shrewd and competent negress had not figured after some fashion or other: as foster parent, as unofficial but none the less capable guardian, as confidante, as overseer, as dictator, as tirewoman who never tired of well-doing, as arbiter of big things and little—all these rôles, and more, too, she had played to them, not once, but a thousand times.
It was Aunt Sharley who had dressed them for their first real party—not a play-party, as the saying went down our way, but a regular dancing party, corresponding to a début in some more ostentatious and less favoured communities. It was Aunt Sharley who had skimped and scrimped to make the available funds cover the necessary expenses of the little household in those two or three lean years succeeding their mother's death, when dubious investments, which afterward turned out to be good ones, had chiseled a good half off their income from the estate. It was Aunt Sharley who, when the question of going away to boarding school rose, had joined by invitation in the conference on ways and means with the girls' guardians, Judge Priest and Doctor Lake, and had cast her vote and her voice in favour of the same old-fashioned seminary that their mother in her girlhood had attended. The sisters themselves had rather favoured an Eastern establishment as being more fashionable and smarter, but the old woman stood fast in her advocacy of the other school. What had been good enough for her beloved mistress was good enough for her mistress' daughters, she insisted; and, anyhow, hadn't the quality folks always gone there? Promptly Doctor Lake and Judge Priest sided with her; and so she had her way about this important matter, as she had it about pretty much everything else.
It was Aunt Sharley who had indignantly and jealously vetoed the suggestion that a mulatto sewing woman, famed locally for her skill, should be hired to assist in preparing the wardrobes that Emmy Lou and Mildred must take with them. It was Aunt Sharley who, when her day's duties were over, had sat up night after night until all hours, straining her eyes as she plied needle and scissors, basting and hemming until she herself was satisfied that her chillen's clothes would be as ample and as ornate as the clothes which any two girls at the boarding school possibly could be expected to have. It was Aunt Sharley who packed their trunks for them, who kissed them good-by at the station, all three of them being in tears, and who, when the train had vanished down the tracks to the southward, had gone back to the empty house, there to abide until they came home to her again. They had promised to write to her every week—and they had, too, except when they were too busy or when they forgot it. Finally, it was Aunt Sharley who never let them forget that their grandfather had been a governor of the state, that their father had been a colonel in the Confederacy, and that they were qualified "to hole up they haids wid de fines' in de land."
When they came to this phase of the recapitulation there sprang into the minds of both of them a recollection of that time years and years in the past when Aunt Sharley, accompanying them on a Sunday-school picnic in the capacity of nursemaid, had marred the festivities by violently snatching Mildred out of a circle playing King Willyum was King James' Son just as the child was about to be kissed by a knickerbockered admirer who failed to measure up to Aunt Sharley's jealous requirements touching on quality folks; and, following this, had engaged in a fight with the disappointed little boy's coloured attendant, who resented this slur upon the social standing of her small charge. Aunt Sharley had come off victor in the bout, but the picnic had been spoiled for at least three youngsters. So much for Aunt Sharley's virtues—for her loyalty, her devotion, her unremitting faithfulness, her championship of their destinies, her stewardship over all their affairs. Now to turn the shield round and consider its darker side:
Aunt Sharley was hardly a fit candidate for canonisation yet. Either it was too early for that—or it was too late. She was unreasonable, she was crotchety, she was contentious, she was incredibly intolerant of the opinions of others, and she was incredibly hardheaded. She had always been masterful and arrogant; now more and more each day she was becoming a shrew and a tyrant and a wrangler. She was frightfully noisy; she clarioned her hallelujah hymns at the top of her voice, regardless of what company might be in the house. She dipped snuff openly before friends of the girls and new acquaintances alike. She refused point-blank to wear a cap and apron when serving meals. She was forever quarrelling with the neighbours' servants, with delivery boys, with marketmen and storekeepers. By sheer obstinacy she defeated all their plans for hiring a second servant, declaring that if they dared bring another darky on the place she would take pleasure in scalding the interloper with a kettle of boiling water. She sat in self-imposed judgment upon their admirers, ruthlessly rejecting those courtiers who did not measure up to her arbitrary standards for appraising the local aristocracy; and toward such of the young squires as fell under the ban of her disfavour she deported herself in such fashion as to leave in their minds no doubt whatsoever regarding her hostility. In public she praised her wards; in private she alternately scolded and petted them. She was getting more feeble, now that age and infirmities were coming upon her, wherefore the house showed the lack of proper care. They were afraid of her, though they loved her with all their hearts and knew she loved them to the exclusion of every living person; they were apprehensive always of her frequent and unrestrained outbreaks of temper. She shamed them and she humiliated them and she curbed them in perfectly natural impulses—impulses that to them seemed perfectly proper also.