“Emma,” said Peter, after a pause, “tell me exactly what you want me to do for you and if I can I’ll do it.”

“I wants to go wid you.  I jes’ natchelly ain’t gwine stay ’yuh by my alonese ’f,” wept Emma.

Peter looked at her with the sort of tenderness one must be born in the South to understand.  Born in the last years of slavery, brought up in wild Reconstruction days, Emma couldn’t read or write.  She wasn’t amenable to discipline.  She was, as Cassius had complained, “so contrary she mus’ be ’flicted wid de moonness.”  She wore a rabbit foot and a conjure bag and believed in ha’nts and hoodoos.  But, as far back as he could remember, Emma Campbell had formed a large part of the background of his life.  He wondered just what he would have done if it hadn’t been for Emma, after his mother’s death.  There slid into his mind the picture of a shabby youngster weeping over a cheap green-and-gold Collection of Poetic Gems; and he reached over and laid a brown hand upon a black one.

“Well, and why not?” mused Peter.  “You stood by me when I hadn’t any money; why should you leave me the minute I get it?  But are you sure you really want to go along, Emma?  I’m going into a foreign country, remember.  You won’t be able to understand a word anybody says.  You’ll be a mighty lonesome old nigger over there.”

“I can talk wid my cat, can’t I?”

“Holy Moses!  What, the cat, too?” Peter ran his hands through his hair, distractedly.

“Whah you goes, I goes.  En whah I goes, dat cat goes.  Dat cat ’s we-all’s folks.”

“Oh, all right,” said Peter, resignedly.  After all, Emma Campbell and the cat were all the folks he had.

He went to Charleston the next morning, in accordance with the instructions his uncle had given him in their last talk, and the bank at which he presented himself treated him with distinguished consideration.  Peter heard for the first time the dulcet accents of Money.

Like Mr. Wilfer in “Our Mutual Friend,” Peter had never had everything all together all at once.  When he had a suit his shoes were shabby, and when it got around to shoes his coat was shiny in the seams and his hat of last year’s vintage.  He was boyishly delighted to buy at one time all that he wanted, but as made-to-order clothes were altogether outside of his reckoning as yet, he bought ready-made.  His taste was too simple to be essentially bad, but you knew he was a country boy in store clothes and a made tie.

He had never been in Charleston before, and he reveled in the ineluctable charm of the lovely old town.  No South Carolinian is ever disappointed in Charleston.  Peter thought the city resembled one of her own old ladies, a dear dignified gentlewoman in reduced circumstances, in a worn silk gown and a mended lace cap and a cameo brooch.  It might be against the old gentlewoman’s religious convictions to bestow undue care upon her personal appearance, but hers was a venerable, unforgetable, and most beautiful old face for all that, and perhaps because of it.  She knew that the kingdom of God is within; and being sure of that, she was sure of herself, serene, unpainted, unpretentious.