“All is lost save honor and there’s damn little of that left, hardly a copper cent’s worth. Tell him to set his mind upon the silken satin sails of certainty. Pour me out another cup of coffee, Dosia, and pass me the jam, Siver. It is jam, isn’t it? Jam is the staff of life and there’s damn little of it left. Damn the jam. Tonight I have to practise again for the play. I take the part of the wicked villain because of my deep stentorian voice. It’s for the benefit of the Sabbath School, and you should go and assist a cause if not to see your sire saw the air. I am your sire, ain’t I? Theodosia sired by Horace, he by Anthony the grand old war horse, he out of Theodosia Montford by Luke Bell. I have to practise tonight for the play. It’s for the benefit of some charity, I forget what, some measure promoted by the combined Sabbath-school interests of the entire town. It’s a big thing. Which of these renderens do you like best? You see the beautiful young lady is in a hazardous position from poverty and what-not....” “What did my mother die of?” Theodosia asked after the matter of the renderings had been settled. “Of a meningitis. I was not here at the time. In Lester, I was, attenden court, I recall. I hurried home as soon as I learned of it and asked what was the matter. They said a meningitis. How old are you, Dosia?” “I’m twenty.” “To think it! Twenty! Then it’s been seven years, eight, how many? Since your mother died? I recollect I heard them say, ‘The poor motherless orphan, twelve years old.’ Or did they say thirteen? I don’t know why I never married again. Eight years a widower, I’ve been, and not altogether unpresentable to the sex, I’ve heard it said.” Theodosia wept softly behind her downcast eyes when she turned her thought to her mother. She remembered her as a large broken woman lying on her couch all day, sometimes playing sonatas on the piano half the night. She had given Theodosia the bedroom above the parlor the spring before she died. She was remembered standing at the doorway of the room, ill, directing the houseman to change the furniture this way and that, trying several arrangements. “Your mother was a lady and a pretty woman to boot,” Horace said. “But the family trees all come by your father, and don’t you forget that, all the shrubbery. I remember how Mike O’Connor laughed one time when I said, ‘Two lions couchant, male and female created he them.’ You ought to ’a’ heard old Mike O’Connor roar to that. ‘But don’t you ever let any woman get a hold onto you,’ Mike O’Connor says. ‘Not a firm hold. She’ll make you roll a baby buggy, and what does a man look like a-rollen a baby buggy? You never saw a Irishman a-rollen a baby buggy,’ Mike says. ‘Think back,’ Mike says, ‘and see if ever you saw a Irishman rollen one of them things. Not a real God-knows Irishman. You never did. And you never will.’”