Becky was nineteen, and her school days were just over. She knew nothing
of men, she knew nothing indeed of life. The world was to her an open
sea, to sail its trackless wastes she had only a cockle-shell of dreams.

"If anybody," said Judge Bannister, on the first day of the Horse Show,
"thinks I am going to eat dabs of things at the club when I can have
Mandy to cook for me, they think wrong."

He gave orders, therefore, which belonged to more opulent days, when his
father's estate had swarmed with blacks. There was now in the Judge's
household only Mandy, the cook, and Calvin, her husband. Mandy sat up
half the night to bake a cake, and Calvin killed chickens at dawn, and
dressed them, and pounded the dough for biscuits on a marble slab, and
helped his wife with the mayonnaise.

When at last the luncheon was packed there was coffee in the thermos
bottle. Prohibition was an assured fact, and the Judge would not break
the laws. The flowing glass must go into the discard with other
picturesque customs of the South. His own estate that had once been sold
by John Randolph to Thomas Jefferson for a bowl of arrack punch----! Old
times, old manners! The Judge drank his coffee with the air of one who
accepts a good thing regretfully. He stood staunchly by the
Administration. If the President had asked the sacrifice of his head, he
would have offered it on the platter of political allegiance.

So on this August morning, an aristocrat by inheritance, and a democrat
by assumption, he drove his bays proudly. Calvin, in a worn blue coat,
sat beside him with his arms folded.

Becky was on the back seat with Aunt Claudia. Aunt Claudia was a widow