still polite.

The man looked at him with increasing interest. Another word in the
lad's speech had caught his attention--Southerner.

That word had been with him a good deal in recent years; he had not
quite seemed able to get away from it. Nearly all classes of people in
New York who were not Southerners had been increasingly reminded that
the Southerners were upon them. He had satirically worked it out in his
own mind that if he were ever pushed out of his own position, it would
be some Southerner who pushed him. He sometimes thought of the whole New
York professional situation as a public wonderful awful dinner at which
almost nothing was served that did not have a Southern flavor as from a
kind of pepper. The guests were bound to have administered to them their
shares of this pepper; there was no getting away from the table and no
getting the pepper out of the dinner. There was the intrusion of the
South into every delicacy.

"We are Southerners," the lad had announced decisively; and there the
flavor was again, though this time as from a mere pepper-box in a school
basket. Thus his next remark was addressed to his own thoughts as well
as to the lad:

"And so _you_ are a Southerner!" he reflected audibly, looking down at
the Southern plague in small form.

"Why, yes, Mister, we are Southerners," replied the lad, with a gay and
careless patriotism; and as giving the handy pepper-box a shake, he
began to dust the air with its contents: "I was born on an old Southern
battle-field. When Granny was born there, it had hardly stopped smoking;