“There was only the problem of his age, and that was more your mother’s problem than mine,” Aunt Judith continued, in an agitated voice. “She came to me once and asked my advice on it, and I told her that an older man would be suitable, and probably better than a younger one. If there were any ill feelings between your father and me, I’m afraid to say they come from him. You see, I represented something to him, a Southern woman of a certain kind. Your father was a bit like my first husband—blind to shadings. Things were either one way or the other, and people, too. Never mind that I”—both hands gripping the edge of the table, real color seeping through the artificial one in her cheeks—“defied the laws of this state to educate as many of our Negroes as I could. Taught them to read and write. My own husband forbade me from conducting those lessons, I was causing talk, you know, but I defied him, too, because I was young and headstrong and considered such ordinances perfectly barbarous. If you wish to know the truth, I considered our peculiar institution perfectly barbarous, for which I knew, well before the war, we would suffer a Divine judgment. But that’s neither here nor there. I never would have consented to the marriage if I hadn’t thought that your father would make a decent husband. Oh, I wished he had thought better of me, but that wasn’t important. The important thing was your mother’s happiness.”

“Aunt Judith, you said you consented to them getting married?” asked Eliot, in an innocent attempt to get at the truth.

“More than that, I encouraged it,” she answered, and then Arthurlene made another of her sudden materializations. “Yes, by all means, I shall be retiring soon myself,” the old woman answered to the maid’s whispers. As Arthurlene left the room, Drew said:

“We always thought you were against them getting married. We were even afraid to come here. We thought you’d turn us away.…”

“Opposed to the marriage? Merely because your father was from the North?” A troubled look passed over Aunt Judith’s face. “How ever did you get that idea?”

Blind to the effect his comment had had on her, Drew blundered on.

“Mother said so. That you were so against her marrying our dad that they had to run away.”

Aunt Judith reacted as if she’d been slapped.

“They did not run off! Elizabeth could not have said any such thing!”

“Beg pardon, ma’am, but …”

Lacking legs long enough to reach under the table and kick him, Nathaniel told his youngest brother to watch his words, he was getting things all wrong.

“But you told me so yourself, Nat,” Drew whined.

“No, I didn’t!”

Aunt Judith rapped the table with the handle of her cane.