On another occasion, at sight of Joyce Basil cooking over the fire, against whose flame her molded arms took momentary roses upon their ivory, Reybold said to himself:  “Surely there is something above the common in the race of this girl.”  And he asked the question of Mrs. Basil: 

“Madame, how was the Judge, your husband, at the last advices?”

“Hunting the snipe, Mr. Reybold.  I suppose you do not have the snipe in the Nawth.  It is the aristocratic fowl of the Old Dominion.  Its bill is only shorter than its legs, and it will not brown at the fire, to perfection, unless upon a silver spit.  Ah! when the Jedge and myself were young, before his land troubles overtook us, we went to the springs with our own silver and carriages, Mr. Reybold.”

Looking up at Mrs. Basil, Reybold noticed a pallor and flush alternately, and she evaded his eye.

Once Mrs. Basil borrowed a hundred dollars from Reybold in advance of board, and the table suffered in consequence.

“The Judge,” she had explained, “is short of taxes on his Fawquear lands.  It’s a desperate moment with him.”  Yet in two days the Judge was shooting blue-winged teal at the mouth of the Acco-tink, and his entire indifference to his family set Reybold to thinking whether the Virginia husband and father was anything more than a forgetful savage.  The boarders, however, made very merry over the absent unknown.  If the beefsteak was tough, threats were made to send for “the Judge,” and let him try a tooth on it; if scant, it was suggested that the Judge might have paid a gunning visit to the premises and inspected the larder.  The daughter of the house kept such an even temper, and was so obliging within the limitations of the establishment, that many a boarder went to his department without complaint, though with an appetite only partly satisfied.  The boy, Uriel, also was the guardsman of the household, old-faced as if with the responsibility of taking care of two women.  Indeed, the children of the landlady were so well behaved and prepossessing that, compared with Mrs. Basil’s shabby hauteur and garrulity, the legend of the Judge seemed to require no other foundation than offspring of such good spirit and intonation.

Mrs. Tryphonia Basil was no respecter of persons.  She kept boarders, she said, as a matter of society, and to lighten the load of the Judge.  He had very little idea that she was making a mercantile matter of hospitality, but, as she feelingly remarked, “the old families are misplaced in such times as these yer, when the departments are filled with Dutch, Yankees, Crackers, Pore Whites, and other foreigners.”  Her manner was, at periods, insolent to Mr. Reynold, who seldom protested, out of regard to the daughter and the little Page; he was a man of quite ordinary appearance, saying little, never making speeches or soliciting notice, and he accepted his fare and quarters with little or no complaint.