-"

"He is!" she broke in eagerly.

"Then there's not a name in South Carolina that I'd rather have for my
own."

I intended that thrust to strike home, but she turned it off most
competently. "Oh, you mustn't accept us because of our ancestors. That's
how we've been accepting ourselves, and only look where we are in the
race!"

"Ah!" I said, as a parting attempt, "don't pretend you're not perfectly
satisfied--all of you--as to where you are in the race!"

"We don't pretend anything!" she flashed back.

V: The Boy of the Cake

One is unthankful, I suppose, to call a day so dreary when one has
lunched under the circumstances that I have attempted to indicate; the
bright spot ought to shine over the whole. But you haven't an idea what
a nightmare in the daytime Cowpens was beginning to be.

I had thumbed and scanned hundreds of ancient pages, some of them
manuscript; I had sat by ancient shelves upon hard chairs, I had sneezed
with the ancient dust, and I had not put my finger upon a trace of the
right Fanning. I should have given it up, left unexplored the territory
that remained staring at me through the backs of unread volumes, had it
not been for my Aunt Carola. To her I owed constancy and diligence,
and so I kept at it; and the hermit hours I spent at Court and Chancel
streets grew worse as I knew better what rarely good company was ready
to receive me. This Kings Port, this little city of oblivion, held, shut
in with its lavender and pressed-rose memories, a handful of people
who were like that great society of the world, the high society of
distinguished men and women who exist no more, but who touched history
with a light hand, and left their mark upon it in a host of memoirs and
letters that we read to-day with a starved and home-sick longing in
the midst of our sullen welter of democracy. With its silent houses and
gardens, its silent streets, its silent vistas of the blue water in the
sunshine, this beautiful, sad place was winning my heart and making
it ache. Nowhere else in America such charm, such character, such
true elegance as here--and nowhere else such an overwhelming sense of
finality!--the doom of a civilization founded upon a crime. And yet, how
much has the ballot done for that race? Or, at least, how much has the
ballot done for the majority of that race? And what way was it to meet
this problem with the sudden sweeping folly of the Fifteenth Amendment?
To fling the "door of hope" w