“Yes.  We’ll drive around there in it.”

“No,” said he, “send it away.  I don’t feel like riding.”

We walked to the Shoreham.  The cafe looked cheerful, as it always does.  We ordered an extensive supper.  It was good.  There were pretty women in the room, but we looked at them with the austere eyes of disillusioned men, and talked cynically of life.  I cannot recall any of the things we said, though I remember thinking at the time that both of us were being rather brilliant, in an icy way.  I suppose it was mainly about women.  That was to be expected.  Women, indeed!  What were women to us?  Nothing!  And pretty women, least of all.  Ah, pretty women!  Pretty women!...  Yes, yes!

I had ordered fruit to finish off the meal, and I remember that as the dish was set upon the table, it occurred to me that we had made a very pleasant party of it after all.

“Do you know,” I said, as I helped myself to some hothouse grapes, “I’ve had a bully evening.  It has been fine to sit here and have a party all to ourselves.  I’m not so sorry that she did not come!”

Then I ate a grape or two.

They were very handsome grapes, but they were sour.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE LEGACY OF HATE

    ...  Immortal hate,
    And courage never to submit or yield.

    —­PARADISE LOST.

The last time I went abroad, a Briton on the boat told me a story about an American tourist who asked an old English gardener how they made such splendid lawns over there.

“First we cut the grass,” said the gardener, “and then we roll it.  Then we cut it, and then we roll it.”

“That’s just what we do,” said the American.

“Ah,” returned the gardener, “but over here we’ve been doing it five hundred years!”

In Liverpool another Englishman told me the same story.  Three or four others told it to me in London.  In Kent I heard it twice, and in Sussex five or six times.  After going to Oxford and the Thames I lost count.

In the South my companion and I had a similar experience with the story about that daughter of the Confederacy who declared she had always thought “damn Yankee” one word.  In Maryland that story amused us, in Virginia it seemed to lose a little of its edge, and we are proud to this day because, in the far southern States, we managed to grin and bear it.

Doubtless the young lady likewise thought that “you-all” was one word.  However I refrained from suggesting that, lest it be taken for an attempt at retaliation.  And really there was no occasion to retaliate, for the story was always told with good-humored appreciation not only of the dig at “Yankees”—­collectively all Northerners are “Yankees” in the South—­but also of the sweet absurdity of the “unreconstructed” point of view.

Speaking broadly of the South, I believe that there survives little real bitterness over the Civil War and the destructive and grotesquely named period of “reconstruction.”  When a southern belle of to-day damns Yankees, she means by it, I judge, about as much, and about as little, as she does by the kisses she gives young men who bear to her the felicitous southern relationship of “kissing cousins.”