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He looked down at his well worn suit and remembered the patch on his trousers beneath his coat tail. The home of the Barton Randolphs, in West Adams street, was one of the old mansions of that exclusive colony toward which the business district of Los Angeles was advancing, block by block.
The Carters, the Blairs, the Fitzhughs, the Hansons, the Randolphs, the Lees, the Ludwells, the Joneses, the Beverleys, the Tarletons a whole catalogue of them stretched back in his memory. He knew the coat of arms displayed by each house. He could repeat their legends. "I wish you could tell me more," he went on.
The rapidity of motion which kept them both with heads bent forward and seemed to force back any utterance that rose to their lips spared Rose the obligation of conversation, and her companion was equally reticent. But it was evident to her that he half suspected she was running away from the Randolphs, and that she wished to avoid the embarrassment of being overtaken even in persuasive pursuit.
He told me a great deal about the ancient Randolphs, and the way they had fought on caparisoned steeds with lances. "War to-day is different," I warned him. "Not so pictorial." But I knew even then that he would make it pictorial. He would wear his khaki like chain armor. He gave us a farewell feast in his room. It was the season for young squirrels, and he made us a Brunswick stew.
The dispersing congregation touched and claimed them. Mr. Wirt and Commodore Truxtun bore off her companion, and she herself, after a moment of gay talk with all the Randolphs, rejoined Unity and her court. Fairfax Cary called their coach, and Captain Decatur and Mr. Irving and Mr.
"You have to come home. You've got the Randolphs' dinner." "Oh, the devil!" he said. "I forgot all about it. But it doesn't make a bit of difference, anyway. I wouldn't leave the office before I finished this job, for anybody short of the Angel Gabriel." "But what shall we do?" she asked despairingly. "I don't know," said Rodney. "Call them up and tell them. Randolph will understand."
As the burgesses gained the ascendancy over the council, the house became, in the words of Carl Bridenbaugh, "the tobacco gentry club". There sat the new generation of Randolphs, Harrisons, Nelsons, Robinsons, and Lees. There developed around Robinson and his cousin, Attorney-General Peyton Randolph, a group of like-minded gentry known in Virginia politics as the "Robinson-Randolph Clique."
True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes.
Randolph until she died and then continued as housekeeper for her master, while there and in that capacity I was born on the Randolph's plantation August 23, 1846. I was a half brother to the children of the Randolphs, four in number.
This was the conviction on which Lady Randolph acted. But her pursuit for the moment was not entertaining; she very quickly tired of her work. Work is, on the whole, tiresome when there is no particular use in it, when it is done solely for the sake of occupation, as ladies' work so often is. It wants a meaning and a necessity to give it interest, and Lady Randolph's had neither. She worked about ten minutes, and then she paused and wondered what could have become of Lucy. Lucy was not a very amusing companion, but she was somebody; and then Sir Tom would come in occasionally to consult her, to give her some little piece of information, and for a few minutes would talk and give his relative a real pleasure. But even Lucy did not come; and soon Lady Randolph became tired of looking out of the window and then walking to the fire, of taking up the newspaper and throwing it down again, of doing a few stitches, then letting the work fall on her lap; and above all, of thinking, as she was forced to do, from sheer want of occupation. She listened, and nobody came. Two or three times she thought she heard steps approaching, but nobody came. She had thought of perhaps going out since the morning was so fine, walking down to the village, which was quite within her powers, and of planning several calls which might be made in the afternoon to take advantage of the fine day. But she became really fretted and annoyed as the morning crept along. Lucy was losing even her politeness, the Dowager thought. This is what comes of what people call happiness! They get so absorbed in themselves, there is no possibility of paying ordinary attention to other people. At last, after completely tiring herself out, Lady Randolph got up and put down her work altogether, throwing it away with anger. She had not lived so long in its sole company for years, and there is no describing how tired she was of it. She got up and went out into the other rooms in search of something to amuse her. Little Tom had just come in, but she did not go to the nursery. She took care not to expose herself to that. She was willing to allow that she did not understand babies; and then to see such a pale little thing the heir of the Randolphs worried her. He ought to have been a little Hercules; it wounded her that he was so puny and pale. She went through the great drawing-room, and looked at all the additions to the furniture and decorations that Tom and Lucy had made. They had kept a number of the old things; but naturally they had added a good deal of bric-
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