"I think you may make your mind easy about my grandson."
Mr. Tallmadge looked at her in silence for a moment; then suddenly: "Yes, yes; _he'll_ turn out all right." He nodded, as if to say, "Trust me to see to that!" "My experience is, if you want a boy to do a particular thing, set that aim before him at the start. That's the way I was raised; that's the way I propose to raise my grandson."
"We are all members of the Presbyterian Church." It was said as though it had been in obedience to an edict of the Everlasting from the foundation of the world. "You will appreciate the necessity of having my grandson raised under my own eye when I tell you it is my intention that, after he gets through Harvard, he shall succeed to the editorship of my paper."
"My grandson edit an Abolitionist paper?"
Mr. Tallmadge blinked in a slightly nervous fashion, but answered, steadfastly:
"Abolition is abolished, madam; it has served its end. Ethan will naturally fall heir to my property and my profession."
"Ethan is his father's heir first of all--heir to a man who gave his life at Bull Run for our rights, not for the abolition of them."
"Abolition _was_ right, and _is_ law, by the sanction of the God of battles."
Mrs. Gano rose from her chair; the door opened, and in came Miss Hannah. Whether it was chance, or whether she had been waiting outside for the psychological moment, certainly her entrance was opportune. She went through her greeting with a flustered civility that, by its own extreme nervousness, made the situation she had broken in upon seem calm to the point of commonplace. Mrs. Gano found herself trying to put Miss Hannah at her ease.
The tall, thin spinster, with her smooth gray hair and anxious manner, must have been more than double the age of Ethan's mother.
"Of course," she said, "you will stay? Ethan has just been asking if he mayn't sit up a little later to-night."
"Ethan!" Potent conjuration! Mrs. Gano had not come all this way to look after her grandson's welfare and be turned back by a fanatical outbreak on the part of a bigoted Abolitionist. No, and if plain speaking was to be the order of the day, Mr. Tallmadge should not do it all. He had it his own way, however, in the long grace with which he prefaced supper, a performance that sounded in Mrs. Gano's ears aggressively Presbyterian. It appeared at that meal that Miss Hannah was disposed to be indulgent to her little nephew, and that he was devoted to her. He talked very little, and what he had to say he confided in a whisper to his aunt. But as he ate, he stared unceasingly with great gloomy eyes at his grandmother. She saw with deep misgiving that he was permitted to make the same meal as his elders. He declined to share his aunt's decoction of "shells," as she quaintly called cocoa, and joined his grandparents in a large cup of coffee. He bolted down quantities of that moist and leaden Boston brown bread which Mrs. Gano regarded with amazement and alarm, and he seemed to share the New England taste for beans and bacon, a fare which, in the visitor's mind, ranked with the "hog and hominy" of the hard-working plantation blacks; but to place such food before a little delicate child!