notice that when your hostess, with apparent
inadvertence, used the expression in connection with sugar in your
demi-tasse, the subsequent blush was due to your failure to catch
her witticism, ignorantly mistaking it for a lapse of hers.

My wife was going to write to you herself, but I managed to divert
this cruel determination by promising to uphold the honor of the
Old Dominion. There is already too much blood being shed in the
world without spilling that of non-combatants as would have been
"you-all's" fate had she gone after you with a weapon more mighty
than the sword when in the hands of Mr. Wilson or an outraged
woman.

In face of all this and much more, however, my conviction was unshaken.
I talked it over with my companion. He remembered the episode of the
dinner table exactly as I did. Moreover, I still had my notes, made in
the hotel that night. The lady looked at me. My companion was several
places removed from her at the other side of the table. How could she
have meant to include him? And how could she have expected me to say how
he took his after-dinner coffee?

At last, to reassure myself, I wrote to the wisest, cleverest, most
trustworthy lady in the South, and asked her what it all meant.

"Well," she wrote back from Atlanta, "I will tell you, but I am not sure
that you will understand me. The answer is: _She did, but she didn't_.
She looked at and spoke to you and, of course, by all rules of logic she
could not have been intending to make you Morg's keeper in the matter of
coffee dressing. _But_ she never would have said 'you-all' if Morg had
not been in her mind as joined with you. The response, according to her
thought-connotation, would have been from you _and_ from him."

This was disconcerting. So was a letter, received in the same mail, from
a gentleman in Charleston:

It is as plain as the nose on your face that you are not yet
convinced that we in the South _never_ use "you-all" with reference
to one person. The case you mentioned proves nothing at all. The
very fact that there were _two_ strangers present justified the use
of the expression; we continually use the expression in that way,
and in such cases we expect an answer from _both_ persons so
addressed. To illustrate: just a few days ago I "carried" two girls
into an "ice-cream parlor." After we were seated, I looked at the
one nearest m