not to work the slaves too hard in the warm period of the day; and she
showed her interest by having served at her own table the favourite olio
the slaves made of plantains, bananas, yams, calalue, eddoes, cassavi,
and sweet potatoes boiled with salt fish and flavoured with cayenne
pepper. This, with the unripe roasted plantain as bread, was a native
relish and health-giving food.

Ever since the day when she had seen Dyck Calhoun at Spanish Town she
had been disturbed in mind. Dyck had shown a reserve which she felt was
not wholly due to his having been imprisoned for manslaughter. In one
way he looked little older. His physique was as good, or better than
when she first saw him on the hills of Playmore. It was athletic,
strenuous, elastic. Yet there was about it the abandonment of
despair--at least of recklessness. The face was older, the head more
powerful, the hair slightly touched with grey-rather there was one spot
in the hair almost pure white; a strand of winter in the foliage of
summer. It gave a touch of the bizarre to a distinguished head, it lent
an air of the singular to a personality which had flare and force--an
almost devilish force. That much was to be said for him, that he had not
sought to influence her to his own advantage. She was so surrounded in
America by men who knew her wealth and prized her beauty, she was so
much a figure in Virginia, that any reserve with regard to herself was
noticeable. She was enough feminine to have pleasure in the fact that
she was thought desirable by men; yet it played an insignificant part in
her life.

It did not give her conceit. It was only like a frill on the skirts of
life. It did not play any part in her character. Certainly Dyck Calhoun
had not flattered her. That one to whom she had written, as she had
done, should remove himself so from the place of the deserving friend,
one whom she had not deserted while he was in jail as a criminal--that
he should treat her so, gave every nerve a thrill of protest. Sometimes
she trembled in indignation, and then afterwards gave herself to
the work on the estate or in the household--its reform and its
rearrangement; though the house was like most in Jamaica, had adequate
plate, linen, glass and furniture. At the lodgings in Spanish Town,
after Dyck Calhoun had left, her mother had briefly said that she had
told Dyck he could not expect the conditions of the Playmore friendship
should be renewed; that, in effect, she had