The South dines at four o’clock—at least Charleston does.

It was the old English custom and the old Irish custom, too.

In the reign of William the Conqueror people dined at eleven a.m. or was it ten? Then, as civilisation advanced, the dinner hour stole forward. In the time of the Georges it reached four o’clock. In Ireland, the most conservative country on earth, some people even still sit down to table at four—in Charleston every one does.

One would not change the custom for worlds, just as one would not change the old box pews of St. Michael’s or replace the cannon on the Battery with modern ordinance.

Richard Pinckney did not dine at home that day. He was dining with the Rhetts in Calhoun Street, so Miss Pinckney said as they sat down to table. She sniffed as she said it, for the Rhetts, though one of the best families in the town, were people not of her way of thinking. The two Rhett girls had each a motor-car of her own and drove it—abomination!

The automobile ranked in her mind with the telephone as an invention of the devil.

Phyl had not seen Richard Pinckney since the morning and now he was dining out. Her heart had warmed to him at the station on the way to Vernons, and at breakfast he had appeared to her as a quite different person to the Richard Pinckney who had come to Kilgobbin, more boyish and frank, less of a man of the world. She had not seen him since he left the room at breakfast-time to look after her luggage. Miss Pinckney said he had gone off “somewhere or another” and grumbled at him for going off leaving his breakfast not quite finished, she said that he was always “scatter braining about” either at the yacht club or somewhere else.

Phyl, as she sat now at the dining-table with the dead and gone Mascarene men and women looking at her from the canvases on the wall, felt ever so slightly hurt.

Youth calls to youth irrespective of sex. She felt as a young person feels when another young person shows indifference. Then came the thought: was he avoiding her? Was he angry still about the affair at Kilgobbin, or was it just that he did not want to be bothered talking to her, looked on her as a nuisance in the house, a guest of no interest to him and yet to whom he had to be polite?

She could not tell. Neither could she tell why the problem exercised her mind in the way it did. Even at Kilgobbin, despite the fact of her antagonism towards him, Pinckney had possessed the power of disturbing her mind and making her think about him in a way that no one else had ever succeeded in doing. No one else had made her feel the short-comings in the household mÉnage at Kilgobbin, no one else had made her so fiercely critical of herself and her belongings.

She did not recognise the fact, but the fact was there, that it was a necessity of her being to stand well in this man’s eyes.

When a woman falls in love with a man or a man with a woman, the first necessity of his or her being is to stand well in the eyes of the loved one, anything that may bring ridicule or adverse criticism or disdain is death.

Phyl was not in love with Richard Pinckney, nor had she been in love with him at Kilgobbin, all the same the sensitiveness to appearances felt by a lover was there. Her anger that night when he had let her in at eleven o’clock was due, perhaps, less to his implied reproof then the fact that she had felt cheap in his eyes, and now, sitting at dinner with Miss Pinckney the idea that he was still angry with her was obscured by the far more distasteful idea that she was of absolutely no account in his eyes, a creature to whom he had to be civil, an interloper.

Her cheeks flushed and her eyes brightened at the thought, but Miss Pinckney did not notice it. She had turned from the subject of the Rhetts and their automobiles to Charleston society in general.

“Now that you’ve come,” said she, “you will find there’s not a moment you won’t enjoy yourself if you’re fond of gadding about. All the society here is in the hands of young people, balls and parties! The St. Cecilias give three balls a year. I go always, not to dance but to look on. Richard is a St. Cecilia—St. Cecilias? Why, it’s just a club a hundred-and-forty years old. There are two hundred of them, all men, and they know how to entertain. I have been at every ball for the last half century. Not one have I missed. Then there’s the yacht club and picnics to Summerville and the Isle of Palms, and bathing parties and boating by moonlight. If you are a gad-about you will enjoy all that.”

“But I’m not,” said Phyl. “I’ve never been used to society, much. I like books better than people, unless they’re—”

“Unless they’re what?”

“Well—people I really like.”

“Well,” said Miss Pinckney, “one wouldn’t expect you to like people you didn’t like—there’s no ‘really’ in liking, it’s one thing or the other—you don’t care for girls, maybe?”

“I haven’t seen much of them,” replied Phyl, “except at school, and that was only for a short time. I—I ran away.”

“Ran away! And why did you run away?”

“I was miserable; they were kind enough to me, but I wanted to get home—Father was alive then—I felt I had to get home or die—I can’t explain it—It felt like a sort of madness. I had to get back home.”

Miss Pinckney was watching the girl, she scarcely seemed listening to her—Then she spoke:

“Impulsive. If I wasn’t sitting here in broad daylight, I’d fancy it was Juliet Mascarene. What makes you so like her? It’s not the face so much, though the family likeness runs strong, still, the face is different, though like—It’s just you yourself—well, I’m sure I don’t know, seems to me there’s a lot of things hid from us. Look at the Pringles, Anthony’s family, the ones that live in Tradd Street. If you put their noses together, they’d reach to Legare Street. It runs in the family. Julian Pringle, he died in ’70, he was just the same. Now why should a long nose run through a family like that, or a bad temper, or the colour of hair? I don’t know. The world’s a puzzle and the older one grows, the more it puzzles one.”

After dinner, Miss Pinckney ordered Phyl to put on her hat and they started out for a drive.

Every day at five o’clock, weather permitting, Miss Pinckney took an airing. She was one of the sights of Charleston, she, and the dark chestnut horses driven by Abraham the coloured coachman, and the barouche in which she drove; a carriage of other times, one of those deathless conveyances turned out in Long Acre in the days when varnish was varnish and hand labour had not been ousted by machinery. It was painted in a basket-work pattern, the pattern peculiar to the English Royal carriages, and the whole turn-out had an excellence and a style of its own—a thing unpurchasable as yesterday.

They drove in the direction of the Battery and here they drew up to look at the view. On one side of them stood the great curving row of mansions facing the sea, old Georgian houses and houses more modern, yet without offence, set in gardens where the palmetto leaves shivered in the sea wind and the pink mimosa mixed its perfume with the salt-scented air. On the other side lay the sea. Afternoon, late afternoon, is the time of all times to visit this spacious and sunlit place. It is then that the old ghosts return, if ever they return, to discuss the news brought by the last packet from England, the doings of Mr. Pitt, the Paris fashions.

Looking seaward they would see no change in the changeless sea and little change in the city if they turned their eyes that way.

Miss Pinckney got out and they walked a bit, inspecting the guns, each with its brass plate and its story.

Far away in the haze stood Fort Sumter,—a fragment of history, a sea warrior of the past, voiceless and guarding forever the viewless. It may have been some recollection of the Brighton front and of the great harbour of Kingstown with the sun upon it, and all this seemed vaguely familiar to Phyl, pleasantly familiar and homely. She breathed the sea air deeply and then, as she turned, glancing towards the land, a recollection came to her of the story she had been reading that evening in the library at Kilgobbin—“The Gold Bug.” It was near here that Legrand had found the treasure. He had come to Charleston to buy the mattocks and picks—no, it was Jupp the negro who had come to buy them.

She turned to Miss Pinckney.

“Did you ever read a story called ‘The Gold Bug’ by Edgar Allan Poe?” she asked. “It is about a place near here—Sullivan’s Island—that’s it—I remember now.”

“Why, I knew him,” said Miss Pinckney.

“Knew Edgar Allan Poe!” said Phyl.

“I knew him when I was a child and I have sat on his knee and I can see his face—what a face it was! and the coat he wore—it had a velvet collar—his teeth were beautiful, and his hair—beautiful glossy hair it was, but he was not handsome as people use that expression, he was extraordinary, such eyes—and the most wonderful voice in the world. I’m seventy-five years of age and he died in October ’49, and I met him three years before he died, so you see I was a pretty small child. It was at Fordham. He’d just taken a cottage there for his wife, who was ailing with consumption, and my aunt, Mary Pinckney, who was a friend of the Osgoods, took me there. It must have been summer for I remember a bird hanging in a cage in the sunshine, a bob-o’-link it was, he had caught it in the woods.

“Dear Lord! I wonder where that summer day’s gone to, and the bob-o’-link—’pears to me we aren’t even memories, for memories live and we don’t.”

They were walking along, Abraham slowly following with the carriage, and Miss Pinckney was walking in an exultant manner as though she saw nothing about her, as though she were treading air. Phyl had unconsciously set free a train of thought in the mind of Miss Pinckney, a train that always led to an explosion, and this is exactly how it happened and what she said.

“But his memory will live. Look right round you, do you see his statue?”

“No,” said Phyl, sweeping the view. “Where is it?”

“Just so, where is it? It’s not here, it’s not in N’York, it’s not in Baltimore, it’s not in Philadelphia, it’s not in Boston. The one real splendid writing man that America has produced she’s ashamed to put up a statue to. Why? Because he drank! Why, God bless my soul, Grant drank. No, it wasn’t drink, it was Griswold. The man who hated him, the man who crucified his reputation and sold the remains for thirty pieces of silver to a publisher, Griswold, Rufus Griswold—Judas Griswold that was his real name, and he hid it—”

Miss Pinckney had lowered her parasol in her anger, she shut it with a snap and then shot it up again; as she did so an automobile driven by a girl and which was approaching them, passed, and a young man seated by the girl raised his hat.

It was Richard Pinckney.

The girl was a very pretty brunette. This thing was too much for Miss Pinckney in her present temper; all her anger against Griswold seemed suddenly diverted to the automobile. She snorted.

“There goes Richard with Venetia Frances Rhett,” said she. “Ought to be ashamed of herself driving along the Battery in that outrageous thing; goodness knows, they’re bad enough driven by men, scaring people to death and killing dogs and chickens, without girls taking to them—”

She stared after the car, then signalling to Abraham, she got into the barouche, Phyl followed her and they continued their drive.

That evening after supper Miss Pinckney’s mind warmed to thoughts of the good old days when motor-cars were undreamed of, and stirred up by the recollection of Edgar Allan Poe, discharged itself of reminiscences worth much gold could they have been taken down by a stenographer.

She was sitting with Phyl in the piazza, for the night was warm, and whilst a big southern moon lit the garden, she let her mind stray over the men and women who had made American literature in the ’50’s and ’60’s, many of whom she had known when young.

Estelle Anna Lewis of Baltimore, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Cornelius Mathews, Frances Sargent Osgood, N. P. Willis, Laughton Osborn. She had known Lowell and Longfellow, yet her mind seemed to cling mostly to the lesser people, writers in the Southern Literary Messenger, the Home Journal, the Mirror and the Broadway Journal.

People well-known in their day and now scarcely remembered, yet whose very names are capable of evoking the colour and romance of that fascinating epoch beyond and around the Civil War.

“They’re all dead and gone,” said she, “and folk nowadays don’t seem to trouble about the best of them, or remember their lines, yet there’s nothing they write now that’s as good—I remember poor Thomas Ward. ‘Flaccus’ was the name he wrote under, a thin skeleton of a man always with his head in the air and his mind somewhere else, used to write in the Knickerbocker Journal; I heard him recite one of his things.

“That stuck in my head, mostly, I expect, because Thomas Ward didn’t look as if he’d ever kissed a girl, but they are good lines and a lot better than they write nowadays.”

The wind had risen a bit and was stirring in the leaves of the magnolias, white carnations growing near the sun dial shook their ruffles in the moonlight, and from near and far away came the sounds of Charleston, voices, the sound of traffic and then, a thread of tune tying moonbeams, magnolias, carnations and cherokee roses in a great southern bunch, came the notes of a banjo, plunk, plunk, and a voice from somewhere away in the back premises, the voice of a negro singing one of the old Plantation songs.

Just a snatch before some closing door cut the singer off, but enough to make Phyl raise her head and listen, listen as though a whole world vaguely guessed, a world forgotten yet still warm and loving, youthful and sunlit, were striving to reach her and speak to her—As though Charleston the mysterious city that had greeted her first in Meeting Street were trying to tell her of things delightful, once loved, once known and forever vanished.

As she lay awake that night with the moonlight showing through the blinds, the whole of that strange day came before her in pictures: the face of Frances Rhett troubled her, yet she did not know in the least why; it seemed part of the horribleness of automobiles and the anger of Miss Pinckney and the tribulations of Edgar Allan Poe.

Then the fantastic band of forgotten literati trooped before her, led by “Flaccus,” the man who didn’t look as if he had ever kissed a girl, yet who wrote: