Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/260

256 come slipping into the sitting room, smelling vilely of whisky and cackling shrilly about Mill folks and their perfidious ways of loving beneath them and marrying above, or Rolfe Bolling would appear in his stocking feet, the shirt that had been put on clean in the morning as filthy as though he had worn it a week.

Elizabeth would receive the young man kindly though stiffly. She saw so few persons outside of her family that her manner was apt to be distant and constrained. Philip was always cordial and pleasant. He talked farming and crops with Spot with a seeming disregard of the embarrassing interruptions caused either by the outrageous old negress or his father.

Betsy usually could laugh at Mam' Peachy and overlook her father's ill manners and slovenly habits but when Spottswood Taylor was present she took their idiosyncracies very seriously, her bright eyes would fill with tears of mortification and her usually laughing mouth tremble with hurt sensibilities.

"I can't and won't stand it!" she cried out one evening after Spottswood Taylor had driven over for Rebecca and had come into the house for a few minutes. She had asked him in knowing that her father and Mam' Peachy were safe in the kitchen with the doors closed. She knew