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 120 then, than always having that nasty sickly cigarette smell round the place.”

120

“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 they look it—pasty faces.”

“Why!” said he, “what grudge have you got against the Rhetts now, Aunt—it’s as bad to take a girl’s complexion away as a man’s character—what have the Rhetts been doing to you?”

Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear the question for a moment, then she said, speaking as if to some invisible person:

“That Frances Rhett may be reckoned the belle of Charleston, that’s what I heard old Mr. Outhwaite call her, but she’s a belle I wouldn’t care to have tied round my neck. Belle! She’s no more a belle than I am, there are hundreds of prettier girls between here and the Battery, but she’s one of those sort that have the knack of setting young men against each 

 Prev. P 70/185 next