“Oh, no! You left the Union, but you loved what you considered was your country, and you love it still. That’s just my point, just my strange discovery in Kings Port. You retain the thing we’ve lost. Our big men fifty years ago thought of the country, and what they could make it; our big men to-day think of the country and what they can make out of it. Rather different, don’t you see? When I walk about in the North, I merely meet members of trusts or unions--according to the length of the individual’s purse; when I walk about in Kings Port, I meet Americans.--Of course,” I added, taking myself up, “that’s too sweeping a statement. The right sort of American isn’t extinct in the North by any means. But there’s such a commercial deluge of the wrong sort, that the others sometimes seem to me sadly like a drop in the bucket.” “You certainly understand it all,” John Mayrant repeated. “It’s amazing to find you saying things that I have thought were my own private notions.” I laughed. “Oh, I fancy there are more than two of us in the country.” “Even the square piano and Mr. Pinckney,” he went on. “I didn’t suppose anybody had thought things like that, except myself.” “Oh,” I again said lightly, “any American--any, that is, of the world--who has a colonial background for his family, has thought, probably, very much the same sort of things. Of course it would be all Greek or gibberish to the new people.” He took me up with animation. “The new people! My goodness, sir, yes! Have you seen them? Have you seen Newport, for instance?” His diction now (and I was to learn it was always in him a sign of heightening intensity) grew more and more like the formal speech of his ancestors. “You have seen Newport?” he said. “Yes; now and then.” “But lately, sir? I knew we were behind the times down here, sir, but I had not imagined how much. Not by any means! Kings Port has a long road to go before she will consider marriage provincial and chastity obsolete.” “Dear me, Mr. Mayrant! Well, I must tell you that it’s not all quite so--so advanced--as that, you know. That’s not the whole of Newport.” He hastened to explain. “Certainly not, sir! I would not insult the honorable families whom I had the pleasure to meet there, and to whom my name was known because they had retained their good position since the days when my great-uncle had a house and drove four horses there himself. I noticed three kinds of Newport, sir.” “Three?”