re," Hulda said, serene in his presence as a
young woman used to proposals. "I do want to change this life, but I
cannot do it and be conservative. I must fasten upon a free impulse, a
natural chance of some kind. God has kept my heart pure in this dreadful
place, where I was born. Why are you here, if you are conservative? It
is not a gentleman's resort."

He grew a little angry at this thrust, but she continued to look at him
quietly, unaware that she was impertinent.

"I often have business, Hulda, with Joe and Patty; negroes are very
high, and we must buy them where they are to be had. But a deepening
religious interest in you often attracts me here."

"Why religious as well as conservative, sir?"

"I have been afraid that the sights you see here, after the good
instructions I have given you, might make you an infidel."

"What is an infidel?"

"One who, being unable to explain certain evils in life, refuses to
believe anything. That is the case with Van Dorn, a very bad man.
Stepfather Joe is always conservative on that subject. Deviate as much
as he may, he never disbelieves. Aunt Patty, too, erratic as she is,
holds a conservative position on a Great First Cause."

Here McLane drew out his gold spectacles, and turned the leaves of his
Bible over, and pointed Hulda a place to read, beginning, "The fool hath
said in his heart, There is no God." At his command she read it, with
faith, yet observation, her mind being fully alert to the warning Van
Dorn had left her, that in his absence her great trial was to be.

McLane was wearing a gray English suit, with full round paunch, sleek
all over the body, his hair a little gray, his gold glasses dangling in
his hand, patent varnished slippers and silk stockings, and a silk scarf
and cameo pin in it, and a cameo of his deceased sister upon his
finger-ring, marking his attire; his eyes, of a pop kind, much too far
forward, and blue as old china, and yet an animal, not a spiritual
blue--the tint of washing-blue, not of distance; a hare-lip somewhere in
his talk, though the fulness of his very red lips hardly allowed place
for it; and his nose and brows stern and military, as if he had been a
pudding stamped with the die of a Roman emperor or General Jackson.

He watched her reading with censorship, yet desire, patronage, and
oiliness together.

Glancing up when she had read far enough, Hulda thought he was looking
at her as if she was some rarer kind of negress.