me rude."

"Not a bit--not the least little bit in the world. Well, I believe you'll
come to love it, not hate it."

"It," said Phyl. "I don't know that, because I don't know what it is--this
something that is always peeping round corners at me yet hiding itself."

"_Richard_!" came Miss Pinckney's voice from the piazza where she had just
appeared, "smoking cigarettes before breakfast, how often have I told you
I won't have you smoking before breakfast--why, God bless my soul, what
are you doing with all those carnations?"

He flung the cigarette-end away, but she refused to kiss him on account of
the tobacco fumes, though she took the flowers.

Cigarettes, like telephones, automobiles, and the memory of Edgar Allan
Poe, formed a subject upon which once started Miss Pinckney was hard to
check, and whilst she poured out the tea, she pursued it.

"Dr. Cotton it was who told me, the one who used to live in Tradd Street,
he was a relative of Dr. Garden the man that gave his name to that flower
they call the gardenia--had it sent him from somewhere in the South, but
I'm sure I don't know where--New Orleans, I think, but it doesn't matter.
I was saying about Dr. Cotton, _old_ Dr. Cotton of Tradd Street, he told
me that the truth about young William Pringle's death was that he was
black when he died, from cigarette smoking, black as a crow. Used to smoke
before breakfast, used to smoke all day, used to smoke in his sleep, I
b'lieve. Couldn't get rid of the pesky habit and died clinging to it,
black as a crow. I can't abide the things. Your father used to smoke Bull
Durham in a corn cob, or a cigar, he'd a' soon have smoked one of those
cigarettes of yours as soon as he'd have been caught doing tatting. Don't
tell me, there's no manhood in them, it's just vice in thimble-fulls. I'd
much sooner see a man lying healthily under the table once in a way than
always half fuddled, and I'd sooner be poisoned out by a green cigar now
and then, than always having that nasty sickly cigarette smell round the
place."

"But good gracious, Aunt, I'm not a cigarette smoker, only once and away
and at odd times."

"I wasn't talking about you so much as the young men of to-day, and the
young women, they're the worst, for they encourage the others to make
fools of themselves, and if they're not smoking themselves they're sucking
candy. Candy sucking and cigarette smoking is the ruin of the States.
Those Rhett girls _live_ on candy, and th