Mrs. Gifford sniffed. “Would you have called Devil-John Valiant a gentleman? Why, he earned the name by the dreadful things he did. My grandfather used to say that when his wife lay sick—he hated her, you know—he would gallop his horse with all his hounds full-cry after him under her windows. Then that ghastly story of the slave he pressed to death in the hogshead of tobacco.” “I know,” acquiesced Mrs. Mason. “He was a cruel man, and wicked, too. Yet of course he was a gentleman. In the South the test of a gentleman has never been what he does, but who he is. Devil-John was splendid, for all his wickedness. He was the best swordsman in all Virginia. It used to be said there was a portrait of him at Damory Court, and that during the war, in the engagement on the hillside, a bullet took out one of [Pg 127]its eyes. But his grandson, Beauty Valiant, who lived at Damory Court thirty years ago, wasn’t his type at all. He was only twenty-five when the duel occurred.” “He must have been brilliant,” said the visitor, “to have founded that great Corporation. It’s a pity the son didn’t take after him. Have you seen the papers lately? It seems that though he was to blame for the wrecking of the concern they can’t do anything to him. Some technicality in the law, I suppose. But if a man is only rich enough they can’t convict him of anything. Why he should suddenly make up his mind to come down here I can’t see. With that old affair of his father’s behind him, I should think he’d prefer Patagonia.” “I take it, then, madam,” Doctor Southall’s forbidding voice rose from the doorway, “that you are familiar with the circumstances of that old affair, as you term it?” The lady bridled. Her passages at arms with the doctor did not invariably tend to sweeten her disposition. “I’m sure I only know what people say,” she said. “‘People?’” snorted the doctor irascibly. “Just another name for a community that’s a perfect sink of meanness and malice. If one believed all he heard here he’d quit speaking to his own grandmother.” “You will admit, I suppose,” said Mrs. Gifford [Pg 128]with some spirit, “that the name Valiant isn’t what it used to be in this neighborhood?” “I will, madam,” responded the doctor. “When Valiant left this place (a mark of good taste, I’ve always considered it) he left it the worse, if possible, for his departure. Your remark, however, would seem to imply demerit on his part. Was he the only man who ever happened to be at the lucky end of a dueling-ground?” “Then it isn’t true that Valiant was a dead shot and Sassoon intoxicated?”