me?”

“I was thinking,” replied Phyl, “that the old woman in the kitchen—Prue—may have meant Juliet when she called me Julie, and that it was the likeness that set her mind going.”

“It’s not impossible. Prue’s like that crazy old clock Selina Pinckney left me in her will. It’d tell you the day and the hour and the minute and the year and the month and the weather. A little man came out if it was going to rain and a little woman if it was going to shine. But if you wanted to know the time, it couldn’t tell you nearer than the hour before last of the day before yesterday, and if you sneezed near it, it’d up and strike a hundred and twenty. I gave it to Rachel. She said it was ‘some’ clock, said it was a dandy for striking and the time didn’t matter as the old kitchen clock saw to that. It’s the same with Prue, the time doesn’t matter, and they look up to her in the kitchen 134 mostly, I expect, because she’s an oddity, same as Selina Pinckney’s clock. Seems to me anything crazy and useless is reckoned valuable these days, and not only among coloured folk but whites—Dinah, hasn’t Mr. Richard come in yet?”

134

“No, Mistress Pinckney,” replied the coloured girl, who had just entered the room, “I haven’t seen no sign of him.”

“Running about without his luncheon,” grumbled the lady, “said he had a deal in cotton on. I might have guessed it.” Then when Dinah had left the room and talking half to herself, “There’s nothing Richard seems to think of but business or pleasure. I’m not saying anything against the boy, he’s as good and better than any of the rest, but like the rest of them his character wants forming round something real. It wasn’t so in the old days, they were bad enough then and drank a lot more, but they had in them something that made for something better than business or pleasure. Matt Curry didn’t go out and get killed for business or pleasure, and all the old Pinckneys didn’t fight in the war or fight with one another for business or pleasure. There’s more in life than fooling with girls or buying cotton or sailing yacht races, but Richard doesn’t seem to see it. I did think that having a ward to look after would have sobered him a bit and helped to form his character—well, maybe it will yet.”

“I don’t want to be looked after,” said Phyl flushing up, “and if Mr. Pinckney—” she stopped. What she was going to say about Pinckney was not clear in her mind, clouded as it was with anger—anger 135 at the thought that she was an object to be looked after by her 

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