fashion for years and years. So was he. 95 Twenty dollars apiece they cost him, and his clothes were the same. Looked like a picture out of Dickens. Your grandmother was there, too, came from Richmond for the wedding, drove here in her own carriage. She and Simon were the last of the Virginia Mascarenes and they looked it. Seems to me some people never can be new nor get away from their ancestors. If you’d dressed Simon in kilts it wouldn’t have made any difference, much, he’d still have been Simon Mascarene of Virginia, just as stiff and fine and proud and old-fashioned.”

95

“It seems funny that my people should have been the Virginia Mascarenes,” said Phyl, “because—because—well, I feel as if my people had always lived here—this feels like home—I don’t know what it is, but just as I came into the street outside there I seemed to know it, and this house—”

“Why, God bless my soul,” said Miss Pinckney, whose eyes had just fallen on the girl’s empty cup, “here have I been talking and talking, and you waiting for some more tea. Why didn’t you ask, child?—What were you saying? The Virginia Mascarenes— Oh, they often came here, and your mother knew this house as well as Planters. That was the name of their house in Richmond. But what I can’t get over is your likeness to Juliet. She might have been your sister to look at you both—and she dead all these years.”

“Who was Juliet?”

“She was the girl who died,” said Miss Pinckney. “You know, although Richard calls me Aunt, I am not really his aunt; it’s just an easy name for an old 96 woman who is an interloper, a Pinckney adrift. It was this way I came in. Long before the Civil War, the Pinckneys lived at a house called Bures in Legare Street. A fine old house it was, and is still. Well, I was a cousin with a little money of my own, and I was left lonely and they took me in. James Pinckney was head of the family then, and he had two sons, Rupert and Charles. I might have been their sister the way we all lived together and loved each other—and quarrelled. Dear me, dear me, what is Time at all that it leaves everything the same? The same sun, and flowers and houses, and all the people gone or changed— Well, I am trying to tell you— Rupert fell in love with Juliet Mascarene, who lived here. He was killed suddenly in ’61— I don’t want to talk of it—and she died of grief the year after. She died of grief—simply died of grief. Charles lived and married in 1880 when he was forty years old. He married Juliet’s brother’s daughter and Vernons came to him on the marriage. He hadn’t a son 

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