“Bosh!” said Laurence, sturdily.  “She ought to be glad and proud to get that tray, and I’ll bet you Mary Virginia’s delighted with it.  She’s her father’s daughter as well as her mother’s, please.  As for Appleboro not being good enough for her, that’s piffle, too, p’tite Madame, and I’m surprised at you!  Her own town is good enough for any girl.  If it isn’t, let her just pitch in and help make it good enough, if she’s worth her salt.  Not that Mary Virginia isn’t scrumptious, though.  Lordy, who’d think this was the same kid that used to bump my head?”

“She turns heads now, instead of bumping them,” said my mother.

“Oh, she’s not the only head-turner Appleboro can boast of!” said the young man grandly.  “We’ve always been long on good-lookers in Carolina, whatever else we may lack.  They’re like berries in their season.”

“But the berry season is short and soon over, my son:  and there are seasons when there are no berries at all—­except preserved ones,” suggested my mother, with that swift, curious cattiness which so often astounds me in even the dearest of women.

“Dare you to tell that to the Civic League!” chortled Laurence.  “I’ll grant you that Mary Virginia’s the biggest berry in the patch, at the height of a full season.  But look at her getup!  Don’t doodads and fallals, and hen-feathers in the hair, and things twisted and tied, and a slithering train, and a clothesline length of pearls and such, count for something?  How about Claire Dexter, for instance?  She mayn’t have a Figure like her Aunt Sally Ruth, but suppose you dolled Claire up like this?  A flirt she was born and a flirt she will die, but isn’t she a perfect peach?  That reminds me—­that ungrateful minx gave two dances rightfully mine to Mr. Howard Hunter last night.  I didn’t raise any ructions, because, to tell you the truth, I didn’t much blame her.  That fellow really knows how to dance, and the way he can convey to a girl the impression that he’s only alive on her account makes me gnash my teeth with green-and-blue envy.  No wonder they all dote on him!  No home complete without this handsome ornament!” he added.

My mother’s lips came firmly together.

“It is a great mistake to figure Mephistopheles as a rather blase brunette,” she remarked crisply.  “I am absolutely certain that if you could catch the devil without his mask you’d find him a perfect blonde.”

“Nietzsche’s blonde beast, then?” suggested Laurence, amused at her manner.

“That same blonde beast is perhaps the most magnificent of animals,” I put in.  For alone of my household I admired immensely Mr. Inglesby’s secretary.  He was the only man I have ever known to whom the term ‘beautiful’ might be justly applied, and at the word’s proper worth.  Such a man as this, a two-handed sword gripped in his steel fists, a wolfskin across his broad shoulders and eagle-wings at either side the helmet that crowns his yellow hair, looks at one out of many a red, red page of the past with just such blue, dangerous, and cloudless eyes.  Rolling and reeking decks have known him, and falling walls, and shrieks, and flames mounting skyward, and viking sagas, and drinking-songs roared from brass throats, and terrible hymns to Odin Allfather in the midwatches of Northern nights.