e to the other's belief, as soldiers of the blue and the
gray trod delicately on one another's toes after peace was decreed.
Everybody was now half and half, or, as Tudie vividly spoke it, "haff
and hahf." You would hear the same person say "haff-pahst ten,"
"hahf-passt eleven," and "hahf-pahst twelve."

Carthage became as confused in its language as Alsace-Lorraine.

V

All through this tremendous feud Orson Carver had been faithful to
Amelie. Whether he had given Tudie the sack or she him was never
decided. But she was loyal to her dialect. He ceased to call; Tudie
ceased to invite him. They smiled coldly and still more coldly, and then
she ceased to see him when they met. He was simply transparent.

Orson was Amelie's first cavalier in Carthage. He found her mightily
attractive. She was brisk of wit and she adored his Boston and his ways.
She was sufficiently languorous and meek in the moonlight, too--an
excellent hammock-half.

But when the other Outlanders had begun to gather to her standard it
crowded the porch uncomfortably.

Dissension rose within the citadel. Orson's father had fought
Jefferson's father in 1861-65. The great-grandfathers of both of them
had fought Anthony Hopper's forefathers in '76-83. The pronunciations of
the three grew mutually distasteful, and dreadful triangular rows took
place on matters of speech.

Amelie sat in silence while they wrangled, and her thoughts reverted to
Arthur Litton. He had loved her well enough to be ashamed of her and
rebuke her. She was afraid that she had been a bit of a snob, a trifle
caddish. She had aired her new accent and her new clothes a trifle too
insolently. Old customs grew dear to her like old slippers. She
remembered the Littons' shabby buggy and the fuzzy horse, and the drives
Arthur and she had taken under the former moons.

Her father and mother had shocked her with their modes of speech when
she came home, and she had ventured to rebuke them. She felt now that
they ought to have spanked her. A great tenderness welled up in her
heart for them and their homely ways. She wanted to be like them.

The village was taking her back into its slumberous comfortableness.

She would waken from her reveries to hear the aliens arguing their alien
rules of speech. It suddenly struck her that they were all wrong,
anyway. She felt an impulse to run for a broom and sweep them off into
space. She grew curt with them. They felt the chill and dropped away,