"Set down right thar, suh," she stammered, her poor little pretense of ease gone from her, "right thar between Brother Bill and me." "You did say it, Aunt Saidie, I told you you would," screamed the pert boy, beginning an assault upon an enormous dish of batterbread. Maria flinched visibly. "Be silent, Will," she ordered. "Grandfather, you must really make Will learn to be polite." "Now, now, Maria, you're too hard on us," protested Fletcher, flinging himself bodily into the breach, "boys will be boys, you know--they warn't born gals." "But she did say it, Maria," insisted the boy, "and she bet me a whole dish of doughnuts she wouldn't. She did say 'set'; I heard her." Maria bit her lip, and her flashing eyes filled with angry tears, while Carraway, as he began talking hurriedly about the promise of tobacco, resisted valiantly an impulse to kick the pretty boy beneath the table. As his eyes traveled about the fine old room, marking its mellow wainscoting and the whitened silver handles on the heavy doors, he found himself wondering with implacable approval if this might not be the beginning of a great atonement. The boy's mood had varied at the sight of his sister's tears, and he fell to patting penitently the hand that quivered on the table. "You needn't give me the doughnuts, Aunt Saidie; I'll make believe you didn't say it," he whispered at last. "Do you take sugar, Mr. Carraway?" asked Miss Saidie, flushed and tremulous at the head of the overcrowded table, with its massive modern silver service. Poor little woman, thought the lawyer, with his first positive feeling of sympathy, she would have been happier frying her own bacon amid bouncing children in a labourer's cabin. He leaned toward her, speaking with a grave courtesy, which she met with the frightened, questioning eyes of a child. She was "quite too hopeless," he reluctantly admitted --yet, despite himself, he felt a sudden stir of honest human tenderness--the tenderness he had certainly not felt for Fletcher, nor for the pretty, pert boy, nor even for the elegant Maria herself. "I was looking out at the dear old garden awhile ago," he said, "and I gathered from it that you must be fond of flowers--since your niece tells me she has been away so long." She brightened into animation, her broad, capable hands fumbling with the big green-and-gold teacups. "Yes, I raise 'em," she answered. "Did you happen to notice the bed of heartsease? I worked every inch of that myself last spring--and now I'm planting zinnias, and touch-me-nots, and sweet-williams they'll all come along later." "And prince's-feather," added the lawyer, reminiscently; "that used to be a favourite of mine, I remember, when I was a country lad." "I've got a whole border of 'em out at the back large, fine plants, too--but Maria wants to root 'em up. She says they're vulgar because they grow in all the niggers' yards."