, excited;
and she next turned to me with a most natural grin, and saying,
"Chick'n's mos' gone, sah," she went back to the dining room.

This admonition sent me upstairs to make as hasty a toilet as I could.

IX: Juno

Each recent remarkable occurrence had obliterated its predecessor, and
it was with difficulty that I made a straight parting in my hair. Had it
been Miss Rieppe that John so suddenly ran away to? It seemed now more
as if the boy had been running away from somebody. The waitress had
stared at him with extraordinary interest; she had seen his bruise;
perhaps she knew how he had got it. Her excitement--had he smashed up
his official superior at the custom house? That would be an impossible
thing, I told myself instantly; as well might a nobleman cross swords
with a peasant. Perhaps the stare of the waitress had reminded him of
his bruise, and he might have felt disinclined to show himself with it
in a company of gossiping strangers. Still, that would scarcely account
for it--the dismay with which he had so suddenly left me. Was Juno
the cause--she had come up behind me; he must have seen her and her
portentous manner approaching--had the boy fled from her?

And then, his fierce outbreak about taking orders from a negro when I
was moralizing over the misfortune of marrying a jackass! I got a sort
of parting in my hair, and went down to the dining room.

Juno was there before me, with her bonnet, or rather her headdress,
still on, and I heard her making apologies to Mrs. Trevise for being so
late. Mrs. Trevise, of course, sat at the head of her table, and Juno
sat at her right hand. I was very glad not to have a seat near Juno,
because this lady was, as I have already hinted, an intolerable person
to me. Either her Southern social position or her rent (she took the
whole second floor, except Mrs. Trevise's own rooms) was of importance
to Mrs. Trevise; but I assure you that her ways kept our landlady's
cold, impervious tact watchful from the beginning to the end of almost
every meal. Juno was one of those persons who possess so many and such
strong feelings themselves that they think they have all the feelings
there are; at least, they certainly consider no one's feelings but
their own. She possessed an inexhaustible store of anecdote, but it was
exclusively about our Civil War; you would have supposed that nothing
else had ever happened in the world. When conversation among the rest of
us became ge