The other eight months of the year Becky had spent at school in an old convent in Georgetown.  She was a Protestant and a Presbyterian; the Nantucket grandfather was a Unitarian of Quaker stock, Judge Bannister was High Church, and it was his wife’s Presbyterianism which had been handed down to Becky.  Religion had therefore nothing to do with her residence at the school.  A great many of the Bannister girls had been educated at convents, and when a Bannister had done a thing once it was apt to be done again.

Becky was nineteen, and her school days were just over.  She knew nothing of men, she knew nothing indeed of life.  The world was to her an open sea, to sail its trackless wastes she had only a cockle-shell of dreams.

“If anybody,” said Judge Bannister, on the first day of the Horse Show, “thinks I am going to eat dabs of things at the club when I can have Mandy to cook for me, they think wrong.”

He gave orders, therefore, which belonged to more opulent days, when his father’s estate had swarmed with blacks.  There was now in the Judge’s household only Mandy, the cook, and Calvin, her husband.  Mandy sat up half the night to bake a cake, and Calvin killed chickens at dawn, and dressed them, and pounded the dough for biscuits on a marble slab, and helped his wife with the mayonnaise.

When at last the luncheon was packed there was coffee in the thermos bottle.  Prohibition was an assured fact, and the Judge would not break the laws.  The flowing glass must go into the discard with other picturesque customs of the South.  His own estate that had once been sold by John Randolph to Thomas Jefferson for a bowl of arrack punch——!  Old times, old manners!  The Judge drank his coffee with the air of one who accepts a good thing regretfully.  He stood staunchly by the Administration.  If the President had asked the sacrifice of his head, he would have offered it on the platter of political allegiance.

So on this August morning, an aristocrat by inheritance, and a democrat by assumption, he drove his bays proudly.  Calvin, in a worn blue coat, sat beside him with his arms folded.

Becky was on the back seat with Aunt Claudia.  Aunt Claudia was a widow and wore black.  She was small and slight, and the black was made smart by touches of white crepe.  Aunt Claudia had not forgotten that she had been a belle in Richmond.  She was a stately little woman with a firm conviction of the necessity of maintaining dignified standards of living.  She was in no sense a snob.  But she held that women of birth and breeding must preserve the fastidiousness of their ideals, lest there be social chaos.

“There would be no ladies left in the world,” she often told Becky, “if we older women went at the modern pace.”

Becky, in contrast to Aunt Claudia’s smartness, showed up rather ingloriously.  She wore the stubbed russet shoes, a not too fresh cotton frock of pale yellow, and a brown straw sailor.