were stretched over twenty years, and Eugenia
fervently hoped that there were no visitors in heaven, the general
responded to each in turn:

"It is the right of a guest to determine the length of his stay, and, as
a Virginian, my house is open as long as it has a roof over it."

So Aunt Griselda drank her green tea in acrid silence, turning at
intervals to reprove Bernard for taking too large mouthfuls or to
request Eugenia to remove her elbows from the table.

To-day, when Eugenia descended, she was gazing stonily into Miss
Chris's genial face, and listening constrainedly to a story at which the
general was laughing heartily.

"Yes, I never look at these forks of the bead pattern that I don't see
Aunt Callowell," Miss Chris was concluding. "She never used any other
pattern, and I remember when Cousin Bob Baker once sent her a set of
teaspoons with a different border, she returned them to Richmond to be
exchanged. Do you remember the time she came to mother's when we were
children, Tom? Eugie, will you have breast or leg?"

"I don't think I could have been at home," said the general, his face
growing animated, as it always did, in a discussion of old times; "but I
do remember once, when I was at Uncle Robert's, they sent me eighteen
miles on horseback for the doctor, because Aunt Callowell had such a
queer feeling in her side when she started to walk. I can see her now
holding her side and saying: 'I can't possibly take a step! Robert, I
can't take a step!' And when I brought the doctor eighteen miles from
home, on his old gray mare, he found that she'd put a shoe on one foot
and a slipper on the other."

The general threw back his head and laughed until the table groaned,
while Miss Chris's double chin shook softly over her cameo brooch.

Aunt Griselda wiped her eyes on the border of her handkerchief.

"Aunt Cornelia Callowell was a righteous woman," she murmured. "I never
thought that I should hear her ridiculed in the house of her
great-nephew. She scalloped me a flannel petticoat with her own hands.
Eugenia, in my day little girls didn't reach for the butter. They waited
until it was handed to them."

Congo, the butler, rushed to Eugenia's assistance, and the general shook
his finger at her and formed the word "guest" with his mouth. Miss Chris
changed the subject by begging Aunt Griselda to have a wing of chicken.

"I don't believe in so much dieting," she said cheerfully. "I think your
nerves would be b