Now I desired a great deal of information. To learn of an imminent wedding where the bridegroom attends to the cake, and is suspected of diminished eagerness for the bride, who is a steel wasp--that is not enough to learn of such nuptials. Therefore I fear--I mean, I know--that it was not wholly for the sake of telling Mrs. Gregory St. Michael about Aunt Carola that I repaired again to Le Maire Street and rang Mrs. St. Michael’s door-bell. She was at home, to be sure, but with her sat another visitor, the tall, severe lady who had embroidered and had not liked the freedom with which her sister had spoken to me about the wedding. There was not a bit of freedom to-day; the severe lady took care of that. When, after some utterly unprofitable conversation, I managed to say in a casual voice, which I thought very well tuned for the purpose, “What part of Georgia did you say that General Rieppe came from?” the severe lady responded:-- “I do not think that I mentioned him at all.” “Georgia?” said Mrs. Gregory St. Michael. “I never heard that they came from Georgia.” And this revived my hopes. But the severe lady at once remarked to her:-- “I have received a most agreeable letter from my sister in Paris.” This stopped Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and dashed my hopes to earth. The severe lady continued to me:-- “My sister writes of witnessing a performance of the Lohengrin. Can you tell me if it is a composition of merit?” I assured her that it was a composition of the highest merit. “It is many years since I have heard an opera,” she pursued. “In my day the works of the Italians were much applauded. But I doubt if Mozart will be surpassed. I hope you admire the Nozze?” You will not need me to tell you that I came out of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s house little wiser than I went in. My experience did not lead me to abandon all hope. I paid other visits to other ladies; but these answered my inquiries in much the same sort of way as had the lady who admired Mozart. They spoke delightfully of travel, books, people, and of the colonial renown of Kings Port and its leading families; but it is scarce an exaggeration to say that Mozart was as near the cake, the wedding, or the steel wasp as I came with any of them. By patience, however, and mostly at our boarding-house table, I gathered a certain knowledge, though small in amount. If the health of John Mayrant’s mother, I learned, had allowed that lady to bring him up Herself, many follies might have been saved the youth. His aunt, Miss Eliza St. Michael, though a pattern of good intentions, was not always a pattern of wisdom. Moreover, how should a spinster bring up a boy fitly?