a do about it, an’ Fanny say, ’Call him Clematis,’ she say. ‘’At’s a nice name!’ she say.  ‘Clematis.’  So ’at’s name I name him, Clematis.  Call him Clem fer short, but Clematis his real name.  He’ll come, whichever one you call him, Clem or Clematis.  Make no diff’ence to him, long’s he git his vittles.  Clem or Clematis, he ain’ carin’!”

William’s ear was deaf to this account of the naming of Clematis; he walked haughtily, but as rapidly as possible, trying to keep a little in advance of his talkative companion, who had never received the training as a servitor which should have taught him his proper distance from the Young Master.  William’s suffering eyes were fixed upon remoteness; and his lips moved, now and then, like a martyr’s, pronouncing inaudibly a sacred word.  “Milady!  Oh, Milady!”

Thus they had covered some three blocks of their journey—­the too-democratic Genesis chatting companionably and William burning with mortification—­when the former broke into loud laughter.

“What I tell you?” he cried, pointing ahead.  “Look ayonnuh!  No, suh, Pres’dent United States hisse’f ain’ go tell ’at dog stay home!”

And there, at the corner before them, waited Clematis, roguishly lying in a mud-puddle in the gutter.  He had run through alleys parallel to their course—­and in the face of such demoniac cunning the wretched William despaired of evading his society.  Indeed, there was nothing to do but to give up, and so the trio proceeded, with William unable to decide which contaminated him more, Genesis or the loyal Clematis.  To his way of thinking, he was part of a dreadful pageant, and he winced pitiably whenever the eye of a respectable passer-by fell upon him.  Everybody seemed to stare—­nay, to leer!  And he felt that the whole world would know his shame by nightfall.

Nobody, he reflected, seeing him in such company, could believe that he belonged to “one of the oldest and best families in town.”  Nobody would understand that he was not walking with Genesis for the pleasure of his companionship—­until they got the tubs and the wash-boiler, when his social condition must be thought even more degraded.  And nobody, he was shudderingly positive, could see that Clematis was not his dog (Clematis kept himself humbly a little in the rear, but how was any observer to know that he belonged to Genesis and not to William?)

And how frightful that this should befall him on such a day, the very day that his soul had been split asunder by the turquoise shafts of Milady’s eyes and he had learned to know the Real Thing at last!

“Milady!  Oh, Milady!”