You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.
“She’s a nice girl,” said Eugene.
“Yeah,” said Max Isaacs.
“She’s a nice lady.”
He craned his neck awkwardly, and squinted.
“About how old is she?”
“She’s eighteen,” said Eugene.
Malvin Bowden stared at him.
“You’re crazy!” said he.
“She’s twenty-one.”
“No,” said Eugene, “she’s eighteen.
She told me so.”
“I don’t care,” said Malvin Bowden, “she’s no such thing.
She’s twenty-one.
I reckon I ought to know.
My folks have known her for five years.
She had a baby when she was eighteen.”
“Aw!” said Max Isaacs.
“Yes,” said Malvin Bowden, “a travelling man got her in trouble.
Then he ran away.”
“Aw!” said Max Isaacs.
“Without marryin’ her or anything?”
“He didn’t do nothing for her.
He ran away,” said Malvin Bowden.
“Her people are raising the kid now.”
“Great Day!” said Max Isaacs slowly.
Then, sternly, he added, “A man who’d do a thing like that ought to be shot.”
“You’re right!” said Malvin Bowden.
They loafed along the Battery, along the borders of ruined Camelot.
“Those are nice old places,” said Max Isaacs.
“They’ve been good houses in their day.”
He looked greedily at wrought-iron gateways; the old lust of his childhood for iron-scraps awoke.
“Those are old Southern mansions,” said Eugene, reverently.
The bay was still: there was a green stench of warm standing water.
“They’ve let the place run down,” said Malvin.
“It’s no bigger now than it was before the Civil War.”
No, sir, and, by heaven, so long as one true Southern heart is left alive to remember Appomattox, Reconstruction, and the Black parliaments, we will defend with our dearest blood our menaced, but sacred, traditions.
“They need some Northern capital,” said Max Isaacs sagely.
They all did.
An old woman, wearing a tiny bonnet, was led out on a high veranda from one of the houses, by an attentive negress.
She seated herself in a porch rocker and stared blindly into the sun.
Eugene looked at her sympathetically.
She had probably not been informed by her loyal children of the unsuccessful termination of the war.
United in their brave deception, they stinted themselves daily, reining in on their proud stomachs in order that she might have all the luxury to which she had been accustomed.
What did she eat?
The wing of a chicken, no doubt, and a glass of dry sherry.
Meanwhile, all the valuable heirlooms had been pawned or sold.
Fortunately, she was almost blind, and could not see the wastage of their fortune.
It was very sad.
But did she not sometimes think of that old time of the wine and the roses?