She was a gentle, timid, pleasant little body, Peter’s mother, with the mild manners and the soft voice of the South Carolina woman; and although the proverbial church-mouse was no poorer, Riverton would tell you, sympathetically, that Maria Champneys had her pride.  For one thing, she was perfectly convinced that everybody who had ever been anybody in South Carolina was, somehow, related to the Champneyses.  If they weren’t,—­well, it wasn’t to their credit, that’s all!  She preferred to give them the benefit of the doubt.  Her own grandfather had been a Virginian, a descendant of Pocahontas, of course, Pocahontas having been created by Divine Providence for the specific purpose of ancestoring Virginians.  Just as everybody in New England is ancestored by one of those inevitable two brothers who came over, like sardines in a tin, in that amazingly elastic Mayflower.  In the American Genesis this is the Sarah and these be the Abrahams, the mother and fathers of multitudes.  They begin our Begats.

Mrs. Champneys sniffed at Mayflower origins, but she was firm on Pocahontas for herself, and adamant on Francis Marion for the Champneyses.  The fact that the Indian Maid had but one bantling to her back, and the Swamp Fox none at all, didn’t in the least disconcert her.  If he had had any children, they would have ancestored the Champneyses; so there you were!

Peter, who had a fashion of thinking his own thoughts and then keeping them to himself, presently hit upon the truth.  His was one of those Carolina coast families that, stripped by the war and irretrievably ruined by Reconstruction, have ever since been steadily decreasing in men, mentality, and money-power, each generation slipping a little farther down hill; until, in the case of the Champneyses, the family had just about reached rock-bottom in himself, the last of them.  There had been, one understood, an uncle, his father’s only brother, Chadwick Champneys.  Peter’s mother hadn’t much to say about this Chadwick, who had been of a roving and restless nature, trying his hand at everything and succeeding in nothing.  As poor as Job’s turkey, what must he do on one of his prowls but marry some unknown girl from the Middle West, as poor as himself.  After which he had slipped out of the lives of every one who knew him, and never been heard of again, except for the report that he had died somewhere out in Texas; or maybe it was Arizona or Idaho, or Mexico, or somewhere in South America.  One didn’t know.

Behold small Peter, then, the last of his name, “all the sisters of his father’s house, and all the brothers, too.”  Little, thin, dark Peter, with his knock-knees, his large ears, his shock of black hair, and, fringed by thick black lashes, eyes of a hazel so clear and rare that they were golden like topazes, only more beautiful.  Leonardo would have loved to paint Peter’s quiet face, with its shy, secret smile, and eyes that were the color of genius.  Riverton thought him a homely child, with legs like those of one’s grandmother’s Chippendale chair, and eyes like a cat’s.  He was so quiet and reticent that nearly everybody except his mother and Emma Campbell thought him deficient in promise, and some even considered him “wanting.”