or how far it was merely her humor to assert them, nobody ever found out. To all this she added the sweetest temper and the most unselfish{32} devotion to those about her, that it is possible to imagine. She was very distantly akin to Arthur, if indeed she was akin to him at all. But in his childhood he had learned to call her “Aunt Polly,” and during that year of his boyhood which he had spent at Wyanoke, he had known her by no other title. So when she came through the rear doors to meet him in the great hall which ran through the house from front to rear, he advanced eagerly and lovingly to greet her as “Aunt Polly.”
{32}
The first welcome over, Aunt Polly became deeply concerned over the fact that Arthur Brent had walked the five or six miles that lay between the Court House and Wyanoke.
“Why didn’t you get a horse, Arthur, or better still why didn’t you send me word that you were coming? I would have sent the carriage for you.”
“Which one, Aunt Polly?”
“Why, there’s only one, of course.”
“Why, I was credibly informed this morning that there were seventeen carriages here besides the barouche and the carryall.”
“Who could have told you such a thing as that? And then to think of anybody accusing Wyanoke of a ‘carryall!’ ”
“How do you mean, Aunt Polly?”{33}
{33}
“Why, no gentleman keeps a carryall. I believe Moses the storekeeper at the Court House has one, but then he has nine children and needs it. Besides he doesn’t count.”
“Why not, Aunt Polly? Isn’t he a man like the rest of us?”
“A man? Yes, but like the rest of us—no. He isn’t a gentleman.”
“Does he misbehave very grossly?”
“Oh, no. He is an excellent man I believe, and his children are as pretty as angels; but, Arthur, he keeps a store.”
Aunt Polly laid a stress upon the final phrase as if that settled the matter beyond even the possibility of further discussion.
“Oh, that’s it, is it?” asked the young man with a smile. “In Virginia no man keeps a carryall unless he is sufficiently depraved to keep a store also. But I wonder
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