Czytaj książkę: «The Romance of a Plain Man», strona 10

CHAPTER XII
I WALK INTO THE COUNTRY AND MEET WITH AN ADVENTURE

My sleep that night was broken by dreams of roses and pink-shaded lamps. For the first time in my life my brain and body alike refused rest, and the one was illumined as by the rosy glow of a flame, while the other was scorched by a fever which kept me tossing sleeplessly between Mrs. Clay's lavender-scented sheets. At last when the sun rose, I got out of bed, and hurriedly dressing, went up Franklin Street, and turned into one of the straight country roads which led through bronzed levels of broomsedge. Eastward the sun was ploughing a purple furrow across the sky, and toward the south a single golden cloud hung over some thin stretches of pine. The ghost of a moon, pale and watery, was riding low, after a night of high frolic, and as the young dawn grew stronger, I watched her melt gradually away like a face that one sees through smoke. The October wind, blowing with a biting edge over the broomsedge, bent the blood-red tops of the sumach like pointed flames toward the road.

For me a new light shone on the landscape – a light that seemed to have its part in the high wind, in the waving broomsedge, and in the rising sun. For the first time since those old days in the churchyard I felt with every fibre of me, with every beat of my pulses, with every drop of my blood, that it was good to be alive – that it was worth while every bit of it. My starved boyhood, the drudgery in the tobacco factory, the breathless nights in the Old Market, the hours when, leaning over Johnson's Dictionary, I had been obliged to pinch myself to keep wide awake – the squalor out of which I had come, and the future into which I was going – all these were a part to-day of this strange new ecstasy that sang in the wind and moved in the waving broomsedge.

And through it all ran my thoughts: "How fragrant the white rose was in her hair! How tremulous her mouth! Are her eyes grey or green, and is it only the heavy shadow of her lashes that makes them appear black at times, as if they changed colour with her thoughts? Is it possible that she could ever love me? If I make a fortune will that bring me any nearer to her? Obscure as I am my cause is hopeless, but even if I were rich and powerful, should I ever dare to ascend the steps of that house where I had once delivered marketing at the kitchen door?"

The memory of the spring morning when I had first gone there with my basket on my arm returned to me, and I saw myself again as a ragged, barefooted boy resting beneath the silvery branches of the great sycamore. Even then I had dreamed of her; all through my life the thought of her had run like a thread of gold. I remembered her as she had stood in our little kitchen on that stormy October evening, holding her mop of a muff in her cold little hands, and looking back at me with her sparkling defiant gaze. Then she came to me in her red shoes, dancing over the coloured leaves in the churchyard, and a minute later, as she had knelt in the box-bordered path patiently building her houses of moss and stones. As a child she had stirred my imagination, as a woman she had filled and possessed my thoughts. Always I had seen her a little above, a little beyond, but still beckoning me on.

The next instant my thoughts dropped back to the evening before, and I went over word for word every careless phrase she had spoken. Was she merely kind to the boor in her house? or had there been a deeper meaning in her divine smile – in her suddenly lifted eyes? "O Ben Starr, you have won!" she had said, and had the thrill in her voice, the tremor of her bosom under its fall of lace, meant that her heart was touched? Modest or humble I had never been. The will to fight – the exaggerated self-importance, the overweening pride of the strong man who has made his way by buffeting obstacles, were all mine; and yet, walking there that morning in the high wind between the rolling broomsedge and the blood-red sumach, I was aware again of the boyish timidity with which I had carried my market basket so many years ago to her kitchen doorstep. She had said of me last night that I was no longer "common." Was that because she had read in my glance that I had kept myself pure for her sake? – that for her sake I had made myself strong to resist as well as to achieve? Would Miss Mitty's or Miss Matoaca's verdict, I wondered, have been as merciful, as large as hers? "A magnificent animal, but with no social manner," the voice had said of me, and the words burned now, hot with shame, in my memory. The recollection of my fall in the dance, of the crying lips of the pretty girl in pink tarlatan, while she stood holding her ruined flounce, became positive agony. What did she think of my boorishness? Was I, for her also, merely a magnificent animal? Had she noticed how ill at ease I felt in my evening clothes? O young Love, young Love, your sharpest torments are not with arrows, but with pin pricks!

A trailing blackberry vine, running like a crimson vein close to the earth, caught my foot, and I stooped for a minute. When I looked up she was standing clear against the reflected light of the sunrise, where a low hill rose above the stretches of broomsedge. Her sorrel mare was beside her, licking contentedly at a bright branch of sassafras; and I saw that she had evidently dismounted but the moment before. As I approached, she fastened her riding skirt above her high boots, and kneeling down on the dusty roadside, lifted the mare's foot and examined it with searching and anxious eyes. Her three-cornered riding hat had slipped to her shoulders, where it was held by a broad black band of elastic, and I saw her charming head, with its wreath of plaits, defined against the golden cloud that hung above the thin stretch of pines. At my back the full sunrise broke, and when she turned toward me, her gaze was dazzled for a moment by the flood of light.

"Let me have a look," I said, as I reached her, "is the mare hurt?"

"She went lame a few minutes ago. There's a stone in her foot, but I can't get it out."

"Perhaps I can."

Rising from her knees, she yielded me her place, and then stood looking down on me while I removed the stone.

"She'll still limp, I fear, it was a bad one," I said as I finished.

Without replying, she turned from me and ran a few steps along the road, calling, "Come, Dolly," in a caressing voice. The mare followed with difficulty, flinching as she put her sore foot to the ground.

"See how it hurts her," she said, coming back to me. "I'll have to lead her slowly – there's no other way."

"Why not ride at a walk?"

She shook her head. "My feet are better than a lame horse. It's not more than two miles anyway."

"And you danced all night?"

I hung the reins over my arm and we turned together, facing the sunrise.

"Yes, but the way to rest is to run out-of-doors. Are you often up with the dawn, too?"

"No, but I couldn't sleep. The music got into my head."

"Into mine also. But I often take a canter at sunrise. It is my hour."

"And this is your road?"

"Not always. I go different ways. This one I call the road-to-what-might-have-been because it turns off just as it reaches a glorious view."

"Then don't let's travel it. I'd rather go with you on the road-to-what-is-to-be."

She looked at me steadily for a minute with arching brows. "I wonder why they say of you that you have no social amenities?" she observed mockingly.

"I haven't. That isn't an amenity, it is a fact. To save my life I couldn't find a blessed thing to say last night to the little lady in pink tarlatan whose dress I tore."

"Poor Bessy!" she laughed softly, "she vows she'll never waltz with you again."

"She's perfectly safe to vow it."

"Oh, yes, I remember, and I hope you won't dance any more. Do you know, I like you better out-of-doors."

"Out-of-doors?"

"Well, the broomsedge is becoming to you. It seems your natural background somehow. Now it makes George Bolingbroke look frivolous."

"His natural background is the ballroom, and I'm not sure he hasn't the best of it. I can't live always in the broomsedge."

"Oh, it isn't only the broomsedge, though that goes admirably with your hair – it's the bigness, the space, the simplicity. You take up too much room among lamps and palms, you trip on a waxed floor, and down goes poor Bessy. But out here you are natural and at home. The sky sets off your head – and it's really very fine if you only knew it. Out here, with me, you are in your native element."

"Is that because you are my native element? Can you imagine poor Bessy fitting into the picture?"

"To tell the truth I can't imagine poor Bessy fitting you at all. Her native element is pink tarlatan."

"And yours?" I demanded.

"That you must find out for yourself." A smile played on her face like an edge of light.

"The sunrise," I answered.

"Like you, I am sorry that I can't be always in my proper setting," she replied.

"You are always. The sunrise never leaves you."

Her brows arched merrily, and I saw the tiny scar I had remembered from childhood catch up the corner of her mouth with its provoking and irresistible trick of expression.

"Do you mean to tell me that you learned these gallantries in Johnson's Dictionary?" she enquired, "or have you taken other lessons from the General besides those in speculations?"

I had got out of my starched shirt and my evening clothes, and the timidity of the ballroom had no part in me under the open sky. "Johnson's Dictionary wasn't my only teacher," I retorted, "nor was the General. At ten years of age I could recite the prosiest speeches of Sir Charles Grandison."

"Ah, that explains it. Well, I'm glad anyway you didn't learn it from the General. He broke poor Aunt Matoaca's heart, you know."

"Then I hope he managed to break his own at the same time."

"He didn't. I don't believe he had a big enough one to break. Oh, yes, I've always detested your great man, the General. They were engaged to be married, you have heard, I suppose, and three weeks before the wedding she found out some dreadful things about his life – and she behaved then, as Dr. Theophilus used to say, 'like a gentleman of honour.' He – he ought to have married another woman, but even after Aunt Matoaca gave him up, he refused to do it – and this was what she never got over. If he had behaved as dishonourably as that in business, no man would have spoken to him, she said – and can you believe it? – she declined to speak to him for twenty years, though she was desperately in love with him all the time. She only began again when he got old and gouty and humbled himself to her. In my heart of hearts I can't help disliking him in spite of all his success, but I really believe that he has never in his life cared for any woman except Aunt Matoaca. It's because she's so perfectly honourable, I think – but, of course, it is her terrible experience that has made her so – so extreme in her views."

"What are her views?"

"She calls them principles – but Aunt Mitty says, and I suppose she's right, that it would have been more ladylike to have borne her wrongs in silence instead of shrieking them aloud. For my part I think that, however loud she shrieked, she couldn't shriek as loud as the General has acted."

"I hope she isn't still in love with him?"

Her clear rippling laugh – the laugh of a free spirit – fluted over the broomsedge. "Can you imagine it? One might quite as well be in love with one's Thanksgiving turkey. No, she isn't in love with him now, but she's in love with the idea that she used to be, and that's almost as bad. I know it's her own past that makes her think all the time about the wrongs of women. She wants to have them vote, and make the laws, and have a voice in the government. Do you?"

"I never thought about it, but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't like my wife to go to the polls," I answered.

Again she laughed. "It's funny, isn't it? – that when you ask a man anything about women, he always begins to talk about his wife, even when he hasn't got one?"

"That's because he's always hoping to have one, I suppose."

"Do you want one very badly?" she taunted.

"Dreadfully – the one I want."

"A real dream lady in pink tarlatan?"

"No, a living lady in a riding habit."

If I had thought to embarrass her by this flight of gallantry, my hope was fruitless, for the arrow, splintered by her smile, fell harmlessly to the dust of the road.

"An Amazon seems hardly the appropriate mate to Sir Charles Grandison," she retorted.

"Just now it was the General that I resembled."

"Oh, you out-generaled the General a mile back. Even he didn't attempt to break the heart of Aunt Matoaca at their second meeting."

The candid merriment in her face had put me wholly at ease, – I who had stood tongue-tied and blushing before the simpers of poor Bessy. Dare as I might, I could bring no shadow of self-consciousness, no armour of sex, into her sparkling eyes.

"And have I tried to break yours?" I asked bluntly.

"Have you? You know best. I am not familiar with Grandisonian tactics."

"I don't believe there's a man alive who could break your heart," I said.

With her arm on the neck of the sorrel mare, she gave me back my glance, straight and full, like a gallant boy.

"Nothing," she remarked blithely, "short of a hammer could do it."

We laughed together, and the laughter brought us into an intimacy which to me, at least, was dangerously sweet. My head whirled suddenly.

"You asked me last night about the one thing I'd wanted most all my life," I said.

"The thing that made you learn Johnson's Dictionary by heart?" she asked.

"Only to the end of the c's. Don't credit me, please, with the whole alphabet."

"The thing, then," she corrected herself, "that made you learn the a, b, c's of Johnson's Dictionary by heart?"

"If you wish it I will tell you what it was."

For the first time her look wavered. "Is it very long? Here is Franklin Street, and in a little while we shall be at home."

"It is not long – it is very short. It is a single word of three letters."

"I thought you said it had covered every hour of your life?"

"Every hour of my life has been covered by a word of three letters."

"What an elastic word!"

"It is, for it has covered everything at which I looked – both the earth and the sky."

"And the General and the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad?"

"Without that word the General and the railroad would have been nothing."

"How very much obliged to it the poor General must be!"

"Will you hear it?" I asked, for when I was once started to the goal there was no turning me by laughter.

She raised her eyes, which had been lowered, and looked at me long and deeply – so long and deeply that it seemed as if she were seeking something within myself of which even I was unconscious.

"Will you hear it?" I asked again.

Her gaze was still on mine. "What is the word?" she asked, almost in a whisper.

At the instant I felt that I staked my whole future, and yet that it was no longer in my power to hesitate or to draw back. "The word is – you," I replied.

Her hand dropped from the mare's neck, where it had almost touched mine, and I watched her mouth grow tremulous until the red of it showed in a violent contrast to the clear pallor of her face. Then she turned her head away from me toward the sun, and thoughtful and in silence, we passed down Franklin Street to the old grey house.

CHAPTER XIII
IN WHICH I RUN AGAINST TRADITIONS

When we had delivered the mare to the coloured groom waiting on the sidewalk, she turned to me for the first time since I had uttered my daring word.

"You must come in to breakfast with us," she said, with a friendly and careless smile, "Aunt Mitty will be disappointed if I return without what she calls 'a cavalier.'"

The doubt occurred to me if Miss Mitty would consider me entitled to so felicitous a phrase, but smothering it the next minute as best I could, I followed Sally, not without trepidation, up the short flight of steps, and into the wide hall, where the air was heavy with the perfume of fading roses. Great silver bowls of them drooped now, with blighted heads, amid the withered smilax, and the floor was strewn thickly with petals, as if a strong wind had blown down the staircase. From the dining room came a delicious aroma of coffee, and as we crossed the threshold, I saw that the two ladies, in their lace morning caps, were already seated at the round mahogany table. From behind the tall old silver service, the grave oval face of Miss Mitty cast on me, as I entered, a look in which a faint wonder was mingled with a pleasant hereditary habit of welcome. A cover was already laid for the chance comer, and as I took possession of it in response to her invitation, I felt again that terrible shyness – that burning physical embarrassment of the plain man in unfamiliar surroundings. So had I felt on the morning when I had stood in the kitchen, with my basket on my arm, and declined the plum cake for which my mouth watered. In the road with Sally I had appeared to share, as she had said, something of the dignity of the broomsedge and the open sky; here opposite to Miss Matoaca, with the rich mahogany table and the vase of chrysanthemums between us, I seemed ridiculously out of proportion to the surroundings amid which I sat, speechless and awkward. Was it possible that any woman could look beneath that mountain of shyness, and discern a self-confidence in large matters that would some day make a greater man than the General?

"Cream and sugar?" enquired Miss Mitty, in a tone from which I knew she had striven to banish the recognition that she addressed a social inferior. Her pleasant smile seemed etched about her mouth, over the expression of faint wonder which persisted beneath. I felt that her racial breeding, like Miss Matoaca's, was battling against her instinctive aversion, and at the same moment I knew that I ought to have declined the invitation Sally had given. A sense of outrage – of resentment – swelled hot and strong in my heart. What was this social barrier – this aristocratic standard that could accept the General and reject such men as I? If it had sprung back, strong and flexible as a steel wire, before the man, would it still present its irresistible strength against the power of money? In that instant I resolved that if wealth alone could triumph over it, wealth should become the weapon of my attack. Then my gaze met Sally's over the chrysanthemums, and the thought in my brain shrank back suddenly abashed.

"Dolly got a stone in her foot, poor dear," she remarked to her aunts, "and Ben Starr got it out. She limped all the way home."

At her playful use of my name, a glance flashed from Miss Mitty to Miss Matoaca and back again across the high silver service.

"Then we are very grateful to Mr. Starr," replied Miss Mitty in a prim voice. "Sister Matoaca and I were just agreeing that you ought not to be allowed to ride alone outside the city."

"Perhaps we can arrange with Ben to go walking along the same road," responded Sally provokingly, "and I shouldn't be in need of a groom."

For the first time I raised my eyes. "I'll walk anywhere except along the road-to-what-might-have-been," I said, and my voice was quite steady.

Her glance dropped to her plate. Then she looked across the vase of chrysanthemums into Miss Mitty's face.

"Ben and I used to play together, Aunt Mitty," she said, offering the information as if it were the most pleasant fact in the world, "when I lived on Church Hill."

A flush rose to Miss Mitty's cheeks, and passed the next instant, as if by a wave of sympathy, into Miss Matoaca's.

"I hoped, Sally, that you had forgotten that part of your life," observed the elder lady stiffly.

"How can I forget it, Aunt Mitty? I was very happy over there."

"And are you not happy here, dear?" asked Miss Matoaca, hurt by the words, and bending over, she smelt a spray of lilies-of-the-valley that had lain beside her plate.

"Of course I am, Aunt Matoaca, but one doesn't forget. I met Ben first when I was six years old. Mamma and I stopped at his house in a storm one night on our way over to grandmama's. We were soaking wet, and they were very kind and dried us and gave us hot things to drink, and his mother wrapped me up in a shawl and sent me here with mamma. I shall always remember how good they were, and how he broke off a red geranium from his mother's plant and gave it to me."

As she told her story, Miss Mitty watched her attentively, the expression of faint wonder in her eyes and her narrow eyebrows, and her pleasant, rather pained smile etched delicately about her fine, thin lips. Her long, oval face, suffused now by an unusual colour, rose above the quaint old coffee urn, on which the Fairfax crest, belonging to her mother's family, was engraved. If any passion could have been supposed to rock that flat, virgin bosom, I should have said that it was moved by a passion of wounded pride.

"Is your coffee right, Mr. Starr? Have you cream enough?" she enquired politely. "Selim, give Mr. Starr a partridge."

My coffee was right, and I declined the bird, which would have stuck in my throat. The united pride of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, I told myself, could not equal that possessed by a single obscure son of a stone-cutter.

"If you are as hungry as I am, you are famished," observed Sally, with a gallant effort to make a semblance of gayety sport on a frozen atmosphere. "Aunt Matoaca, have pity and give me a muffin."

Muffins were passed by Miss Matoaca; waffles were presented immediately by Selim.

"Do take a hot one," urged Miss Matoaca anxiously, "yours is quite cold."

I took a hot one, and after placing it on the small white and gold plate, swore desperately to myself that I would not eat a mouthful in that house until I could eat there as an equal. The faint wonder beneath the pained fixed smile on Miss Mitty's face stabbed me like a knife. All her anxious hospitality, all her offers of cream and partridges, could not for a single minute efface it. Turning my head I discerned the same expression, still fainter, still gentler, reflected on Miss Matoaca's lips – as if some subtle bond of sympathy between them were asking always, beneath the hereditary courtesy: "Can this be possible? Are we, whose mother was a Fairfax, whose father was a Bland, sitting at our own table with a man who is not a gentleman by birth? – who has even brought a market basket to our kitchen door? What has become of the established order if such a thing as this can happen to two unprotected Virginia ladies?"

And it was quite characteristic of their race, of their class, that the greater the wonder grew in their gentle minds, the more sedulously they plied me with coffee and partridges and preserves – that the more their souls abhorred me, the more lavish became their hands. Divided as they were by their principles, something stronger than a principle now held the sisters together, and this was a passionate belief in the integrity of their race.

Again Selim handed the waffles in a frozen silence, and again Sally made an unsuccessful attempt to produce an appearance of animation.

"Are you going to market, Aunt Matoaca?" she asked, "and will you remember to buy seed for my canary?"

The flush in Miss Matoaca's cheek this time, I could not explain.

"Sister Mitty will go," she replied, in confusion, "I – I have another engagement."

"She alludes to a meeting of one of her boards," observed Miss Mitty, and turning to me she added, with what I felt to be an unfair thrust at the shrinking bosom of Miss Matoaca, "My sister is a great reader, Mr. Starr, and she has drawn many of her opinions out of books instead of from life."

I looked up, my eyes met Miss Matoaca's, and I remembered her love story.

"We all do that, I suppose," I answered. "Even when we get them from life, haven't most of them had their beginning in books?"

"I am not a great reader myself," remarked Miss Mitty, a trifle primly. "My father used to say that when a lady had read a chapter of her Bible in the morning, and consulted her cook-book, she had done as much literary work as was good for her. Too intimate an acquaintance with books, he always said, was apt to unsettle the views, and the best judgment a woman can have, I am sure, is the opinion of the gentlemen of her family."

"That may be true," I admitted, and my self-possession returned to me, until a certain masculine assurance sounded in my voice, "but I'm quite sure I shouldn't like anybody else's opinion to decide mine."

"You are a man," rejoined Miss Mitty, and I felt that she had not been able to bring her truthful lips to utter the word "gentleman." "It is natural that you should have independent ideas, but, as far as I am concerned, I am perfectly content to think as my grandmother and my great-grandmother have thought before me. Indeed, it seems to me almost disrespectful to differ from them."

"And it was dear great-grandmama," laughed Sally, "who when the doctor once enquired if her tooth ached, turned to great-grandpapa and asked, 'Does it ache, Bolivar?'"

She had tossed her riding hat aside, and a single loosened wave of her hair had fallen low on her forehead above her arched black eyebrows. Beneath it her eyes, very wide and bright, held a puzzled yet resolute look, as if they were fixed upon an obstacle which frightened her, and which she was determined to overcome.

"You are speaking of my grandmama, Sally," observed Miss Mitty, and I could see that the levity of the girl had wounded her.

"I'm sorry, dear Aunt Mitty, she was my great-grandmama, too, but that doesn't keep me from thinking her a very silly person."

"A silly person? Your own great-grandmama, Sally!" Her mind, long and narrow, like her face, had never diverged, I felt, from the straight line of descent.

"My sister and I unfortunately do not agree in our principles, Mr. Starr," said Miss Matoaca, breaking her strained silence suddenly in a high voice, and with an energy that left tremors in her thin, delicate figure. "Indeed, I believe that I hold views which are opposed generally by Virginia ladies – but I feel it to be a point of honour that I should let them be known." She paused breathlessly, having delivered herself of the heresy that worked in her bosom, and a moment later she sat trembling from head to foot with her eyes on her plate. Poor little gallant lady, I thought, did she remember the time when at the call of that same word "honour," she had thrown away, not only her peace, but her happiness?

"Whatever your opinions may be, Miss Matoaca, I respect your honest and loyal support of them," I said.

The embarrassment that had overwhelmed me five minutes before had vanished utterly. At the first chance to declare myself – to contend, not merely with a manner, but with a situation, I felt the full strength of my manhood. The General himself could not have uttered his piquant pleasantries in a blither tone than I did my impulsive defence of the right of private judgment. Miss Mitty raised her eyes to mine, and Miss Matoaca did likewise. Over me their looks clashed, and I saw at once that it was the relentless warfare between individual temperament and racial instinct. In spite of the obscurity of my birth, I knew that in Miss Matoaca, at that instant, I had won a friend.

"Surely Aunt Matoaca is right to express what she thinks," said Sally, loyally following my lead.

"No woman of our family has ever thought such things, Sally, or has ever felt called upon to express her views in the presence of men."

"Well, I suppose, some woman has got to begin some day, and it may as well be Aunt Matoaca."

"There is no reason why any woman should begin. Your great-grandmama did not."

"But my great-grandmama couldn't tell when her tooth ached, and you can, I've heard you do it. It was very disrespectful of you, dear Auntie."

"If you cannot be serious, Sally, I refuse to discuss the subject."

"But how can anybody be serious, Aunt Mitty, about a person who didn't know when her own tooth ached?"

"Dear sister," remarked Miss Matoaca, in a voice of gentle obstinacy, "I do not wish to be the cause of a disagreement between Sally and yourself. Any question that was not one of principle I should gladly give up. I know you are not much of a reader, but if you would only glance at an article in the last Fortnightly Review on the Emancipation of Women – "

"I should have thought, sister Matoaca, that Dr. Peterson's last sermon in St. Paul's on the feminine sphere would have been a far safer guide for you. His text, Mr. Starr," she added, turning to me, "was, 'She looketh well to the ways of her household.'"

"At least you can't accuse Aunt Matoaca of neglecting the ways of her household," said Sally, merrily, "even the General rises up after dinner and praises her mince pies. Do you like mince pies, Ben?"

I replied that I was sure that I should like Miss Matoaca's, for I had heard them lauded by General Bolingbroke; at which the poor lady blushed until her cheeks looked like withered rose leaves. She was one of those unhappy women, I had learned during breakfast, who suffered from a greater mental activity than was usually allotted to the females of their generation. Behind that long and narrow face, with its pencilled eyebrows, its fine, straight nose, and restlessly shining eyes, what battles of conviction against tradition must have waged. Was the final triumph of intellect due, in reality, to the accident of an unhappy love? Had the General's frailties driven this shy little lady, with her devotion to law and order, and her excellent mince pies, into a martyr for the rights of sex?

"I am told that Mrs. Clay prides herself upon her pies," she remarked. "I have never eaten them, but Dr. Theophilus tells me that he prefers mine because I use less suet."

"I am sure nobody's could compare with yours, sister Matoaca," observed Miss Mitty in an affable tone, "and I happen to know that Mrs. Clay resorts to Mrs. Camberwell's cook-book. We prefer Mrs. Randolph's," she added, turning to me.