The other eight months of the year Becky had spent at school in an old
convent in Georgetown. She was a Protestant and a Presbyterian; the
Nantucket grandfather was a Unitarian of Quaker stock, Judge Bannister
was High Church, and it was his wife's Presbyterianism which had been
handed down to Becky. Religion had therefore nothing to do with her
residence at the school. A great many of the Bannister girls had been
educated at convents, and when a Bannister had done a thing once it was
apt to be done again.

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