"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Eugie," said Miss Chris severely. "Now go upstairs and wash your face and hands before dinner. It is almost ready. I wonder where Bernard is!" "Can't I wait twell the bell rings?" Eugenia asked; but Miss Chris shook her head decisively. "Eugenia, will you never stop talking like a darkey?" she demanded. "How often must I tell you that there's no such word as 'twell'? Now, go right straight upstairs." Eugenia rose obediently and went into the hall. She had learned from her father and the servants not to dispute the authority of Miss Chris, though she yielded to it with a mild surprise at her own docility. "She don't really manage me," she had once confided to Delphy, the washerwoman, "but I jes' plays that she does." VI When Eugenia came downstairs she found the family seated at dinner, Miss Chris and her father beaming upon each other across a dish of fried chicken and a home-cured ham. Bernard was on Miss Chris's right hand, and on the other side of the table Eugenia's seat separated the general from Aunt Griselda, who sat severely buttering her toast before a brown earthenware teapot ornamented by a raised design of Rebecca at the well. Aunt Griselda was a lean, dried-up old lady, with a sharp, curved nose like the beak of a bird, and smoothly parted hair brushed low over her ears and held in place by a tortoise-shell comb. There were deep channels about her eyes, worn by the constant falling of acrid tears, and her cheeks were wrinkled and yellowed like old parchment. Twenty years ago, when the general had first brought home his young wife, before her buoyancy had faltered, and before the five little head-boards to the five stillborn children had been set up amid the periwinkle in the family graveyard, Aunt Griselda had written from the home of her sister to say that she would stop over at Battle Hall on her way to Richmond.