You will not need me to tell you that I came out of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s house little wiser than I went in.  My experience did not lead me to abandon all hope.  I paid other visits to other ladies; but these answered my inquiries in much the same sort of way as had the lady who admired Mozart.  They spoke delightfully of travel, books, people, and of the colonial renown of Kings Port and its leading families; but it is scarce an exaggeration to say that Mozart was as near the cake, the wedding, or the steel wasp as I came with any of them.  By patience, however, and mostly at our boarding-house table, I gathered a certain knowledge, though small in amount.

If the health of John Mayrant’s mother, I learned, had allowed that lady to bring him up Herself, many follies might have been saved the youth.  His aunt, Miss Eliza St. Michael, though a pattern of good intentions, was not always a pattern of wisdom.  Moreover, how should a spinster bring up a boy fitly?

Of the Rieppes, father and daughter, I also learned a little more.  They did not (most people believed) come from Georgia.  Natchez and Mobile seemed to divide the responsibility of giving them to the world.  It was quite certain the General had run away from Chattanooga.  Nobody disputed this, or offered any other battle as the authentic one.  Of late the Rieppes were seldom to be seen in Kings Port.  Their house (if it had ever been their own property, which I heard hotly argued both ways) had been sold more than two years ago, and their recent brief sojourns in the town were generally beneath the roof of hospitable friends—­people by the name of Cornerly, “whom we do not know,” as I was carefully informed by more than one member of the St. Michael family.  The girl had disturbed a number of mothers whose sons were prone to slip out of the strict hereditary fold in directions where beauty or champagne was to be found; and the Cornerlys dined late, and had champagne.  Miss Hortense had “splurged it” a good deal here, and the measure of her success with the male youth was the measure of her condemnation by their female elders.

Such were the facts which I gathered from women and from the few men whom I saw in Kings Port.  This town seemed to me almost as empty of men as if the Pied Piper had passed through here and lured them magically away to some distant country.  It was on the happy day that saw Miss Eliza La Heu again providing me with sandwiches and chocolate that my knowledge of the wedding and the bride and groom began really to take some steps forward.

It was not I who, at my sequestered lunch at the Woman’s Exchange, began the conversation the next time.  That confection, “Lady Baltimore,” about which I was not to worry myself, had, as they say, “broken the ice” between the girl behind the counter and myself.

“He has put it off!” This, without any preliminaries, was her direct and stimulating news.

I never was more grateful for the solitude of the Exchange, where I had, before this, noted and blessed an absence of lunch customers as prevailing as the trade winds; the people I saw there came to talk, not to purchase.  Well, I was certainly henceforth coming for both!