his
own. They had got to that pleasant stage of intimacy where conversation
can be dropped without awkwardness and picked up again haphazard, but you
cannot be silent long in the streets of Charleston on a spring day. They
visited the market-place and inspected the buzzards and then, somehow,
without knowing it, they drifted on to the water side. Here where the
docks lie deserted and the green water washes the weed grown and rotting
timbers of wharves they took their seats on a baulk of timber to rest and
contemplate things.

"There used to be ships here once," said he. "Lots of ships--but that was
before the war."

He was silent and Phyl glanced sideways at him, wondering what was in his
mind. She soon found out. A struggle was going on between his two selves,
his business self that demanded up-to-dateness, bustle, and the energetic
conduct of affairs, and his other self that was content to let things lie,
to see Charleston just as she was, unspoiled by the thing we call Business
Prosperity. It was a battle between the South and the North in him.

He talked it out to her. Went into details, pointed to Galveston and New
Orleans, those greedy sea mouths that swallow the goods of the world and
give out cotton, whilst Charleston lay idle, her wharves almost deserted,
her storehouses empty.

He spoke almost vehemently, spoke as a business man speaks of wasted
chances and things neglected. Then, when he had finished, the girl put in
her word.

"Well," said she, "it may be so but I don't want it any different from
what it is."

Pinckney laughed, the laugh of a man who is confessing a weakness.

"I don't know that I do either," said he.

It was rank blasphemy against Business. At the club you would often find
him bemoaning the business decay of the city he loved, but here, sitting
by the girl on the forsaken wharf, in the sunshine, the feeling suddenly
came to him that there was something here that business would drive away.
Something better than Prosperity.

It was as though he were looking at things for a moment through her eyes.

They came back through the sunlit streets to find Miss Pinckney recovered
from the Seth business, and after luncheon that day, assisted by Dinah and
the directions of Miss Pinckney, Phyl's hair "went up."

"It's beautiful," said the old lady, as she contemplated the result, "and
more like Juliet than ever. Take the glass and look at yourself."

Phyl did.

She did not see the beauty