ccasion
it was upon the poor boy himself and not on the smoking habits of Miss
Rieppe, that his aunt had heavily descended. I also reflected that if
cigarettes were the only thing he deprecated in the lady of his choice,
the lost illusion might be coaxed back. The trouble was that deprecated
something fairly distant from cigarettes. The cake was my quite
sufficient trouble; it stuck in my throat worse than the probably
magnified gossip I had heard; this, for the present, I could manage to
swallow.

He came out now with a personal note. "I suppose you think I'm a ninny."

"Never in the wildest dream!"

"Well, but too innocent for a man, anyhow."

"That would be an insult," I declared laughingly.

"For I'm not innocent in the least. You'll find we're all men here, just
as much as any men in the North you could pick out. South Carolina
has never lacked sporting blood, sir. But in Newport--well, sir, we
gentlemen down here, when we wish a certain atmosphere and all that,
have always been accustomed to seek the demi-monde."

"So it was with us until the women changed it."

"The women, sir?" He was innocent!

"The 'ladies,' as you Southerners so chivalrously continue to style
them. The rich new fashionable ladies became so desperate in their
competition for men's allegiance that they--well, some of them would, in
the point of conversation, greatly scandalize the smart demi-monde."

He nodded. "Yes. I heard men say things in drawing-rooms to ladies that
a gentleman here would have been taken out and shot for. And don't you
agree with me, sir, that good taste itself should be a sort of religion?
I don't mean to say anything sacrilegious, but it seems to me that even
if one has ceased to believe some parts of the Bible, even if one does
not always obey the Ten Commandments, one is bound, not as a believer
but as a gentleman, to remember the difference between grossness and
refinement, between excess and restraint--that one can have and keep
just as the pagan Greeks did, a moral elegance."

He astonished me, this ardent, ideal, troubled boy; so innocent
regarding the glaring facts of our new prosperity, so finely penetrating
as to some of the mysteries of the soul. But he was of old Huguenot
blood, and of careful and gentle upbringing; and it was delightful
to find such a young man left upon our American soil untainted by the
present fashionable idolatries.

"I bow to your creed of 'moral elegance,'" I cried. "It nev