“Oh, Sophy!  And we’ve got to keep on going there!—­next Sunday, and Sunday after next Sunday, and maybe every Sunday after that until we die!  Perhaps after a while some of them will bow to us, or maybe even say, ‘How do you do?’ but we’ll feel as if we’d been put in cold storage every time we enter that door!” wailed Alicia.

“It is our Father’s house,” I reminded her.

“But I don’t want to be made to feel like a spanked child, in anybody’s house!” Alicia said, resentfully.

“You say that because you’re Irish.”

“You say I say it because I’m Irish because you’re English.”  Then she screwed up her mouth like a coral button, and squinted her eyes:  “I’m Irish, and you’re English, and we’re both American.  Sophy, let’s join my Irish and your English to our Yankee, and teach this town a lesson!”

“Barkis is willin’.  But in the meantime let’s go home and see what Mary Magdalen has for lunch.”

We walked slowly, enjoying the calm, lovely late-summer day.  Hyndsville at its best was a big, green, sprawling old town, a quaint, unpainted, leisurely, flowery, bird-haunted place, with glorious trees, and do-as-they-please, independent gardens.  Nobody ever seemed to be in a hurry, and at first we used to wonder how they ever got anything done, or kept pace with the moving world; yet they did.  Only, they did it without haste and without noise.  And they were always polite.  Though they should take your substance, your reputation, or even, perhaps, your life, they would do it like ladies and gentlemen.

We paused a while, just inside the big brick-pillared gate, and looked up the oak-arched garden path toward our house.  Of course one can’t expect an old fortress of a brick house that’s been neglected for more than three quarters of a century to look spick and span inside of a brief fortnight, but already Hynds House was sitting up, so to speak, and taking notice.

Life had begun to flow back into it.  Mary Magdalen had brought a dog with her—­a yellow dog of unknown ancestry, of shamefaced demeanor, a ropy tail, splay feet, and a rolling eye; named, she and heaven alone knew why, Beautiful Dog.

He shunned Alicia and me because we were white people:  Beautiful Dog was intuitively aware that colored people’s dogs must meet white people with suspicion, aloofness, and reserve.  When we fatuously sought to make friends with him, he tucked his tail between his legs, and shivered as if we made goose-flesh come out on his spine; and once when I took him by his rope collar he fell down and shrieked.  But just let Mary Magdalen roll out an unctious, “Whah is yuh, Beaut’ful Dawg?” and his ears and tail went up, he curveted, and made uncouth movements with his splay feet, and grinned from ear to ear.

Doctor Geddes’s Mandy had brought over the black kittens and their mother.  Mary Magdalen made sure of their staying at home by the simple process of buttering their paws.  In South Carolina, when you want a cat to stay in your house, you butter its paws and let it lick the butter off leisurely, the while you whisper in its left ear:  “Stay in my house for keeps, cat!” The cat will ever thereafter play Ruth to your Naomi.