She importuned her mother, too, for details of her ancestry, a subject in which she had never displayed an interest before, and, though her mother pleaded headache, she was at last enabled to recall and body forth, though vaguely, a long dead grandmother whom tradition pictured as a Virginia lady, an F. F. V., in fact.
And then Dade's English accent became a Southern dialect, and it was with a delight that had its own regret, that she heard some one in the hotel parlor ask her one evening what part of the South she came from. An experienced ear would have detected Dade's little deception through its inability to localize her dialect, for if she had heard a Virginian speak, she straightway spoke like a Virginian, if a Kentuckian, like a Kentuckian, if a Georgian, then like a Georgian, and the result was that she mimicked all and mastered the tongue of none.
Yet her honesty compelled her to disclaim Southern birth, though she qualified her denial and regained the place she had momentarily lost in the estimation of her interlocutor by telling him that her family, or part of them, had come from Virginia. Those evenings in the hotel parlor were unsatisfying, however, and she tired of the limits its walls set to her social evolutions.
It was, therefore, with a joy that lent a heightened color to her face, and showed her white teeth in a genuine smile of welcome, that she saw approaching her one evening across the dining-room a young man whose stride and carriage marked him for an officer in the regular army. His waist was as slender and his body as correctly bent as when he had been a shavetail just out of West Point, though that he had seen some sort of service was shown by his face, burned to an Apache bronze by the sun of New Mexico.
He wore his civilian clothes, somewhat old in style, with the unaccustomed air that sits on the army officer when he is out of uniform. Dade did not restrain the look of pleasure that comes to any girl's eyes at the sight of a soldier, especially a soldier with whom she may claim acquaintance, and as his friendly face broke into smiles, she said:
"Why, Mistuh Beck, who would have thought of meeting yo' all heah! Ah thought yo' weh aout fighting Indians somewheah."