"They're after you already," said Pinckney, "only yesterday I heard young Reggy Calhoun saying--"
"I know," said Miss Pinckney, "and I want no more of your impudence. Now take yourself off if you've finished your breakfast, for Phyl and I have work to do."
He got up and went off laughing by way of the piazza and they could hear his cheery voice in the garden talking to the old negro gardener.
Miss Pinckney's eyes softened. She was fiddling with a spoon and when she spoke she seemed speaking to it, turning it about as if to examine its pattern all the time.
"I don't know what mothers with boys feel like, but I do want to see that boy safe and married before I go. He's just the sort to be landed in unhappiness; he is, most surely; well, I don't know, there's no use in warning young folk, you may spank 'em for stealing the jam but you can't spank 'em from fooling with the wrong sort of girl."
Miss Pinckney had talked the night before of Phyl's father and had proposed taking her this morning to the Magnolia cemetery to see the grave. She broke off the conversation suddenly as this fact strayed into her mind, and, rising up, invited Phyl to follow her to the kitchen premises where she had orders to give before starting.
"I always look after my own house," said she, "and always will. Fine ladies nowadays sit in their drawing-rooms and ring their bells for the servants to rob them and they aren't any more respected. That's what makes the Charleston negro the impudentest lump of blackness under the sun, that and knowing they're emancipated. They've got to look on themselves as part of the Heavenly Host. Well, I'll have no emancipated rubbish in my house, and the consequence is I never lose a servant and I never get impudence. They'll all get a pension when they're too old to work, and good food and good pay whilst they're working, and I've said to them 'you're no more emancipated than I am, we're all slaves to our duty and the only difference between now and the old days is I can't sell you--and if you were idle enough to make me want to sell you there's no one would buy such rubbish nowadays.' Half the trouble is that people these times don't know how to talk to coloured folk, and the other half is that they don't want to talk to them."