His traditions had to do with the doffed
hat and the bent knee. He put woman on a pedestal and kept her there. No
man, he contended, was worthy of her--what she gave was by the grace of
her own sweet charity!
It will be seen that in all this he missed the modern note. As a boy he
had been fed upon Scott, and his later reading had not robbed him of his
sense of life as a flamboyant spectacle.
He came to us in college with a beggarly allowance from an impoverished
estate owned by his grandfather, a colonel of the Confederacy, who after
the war had withdrawn with his widowed daughter to his worthless acres.
In due time the daughter had died, and her child had grown up in a world
of shadows. On nothing a year the colonel had managed, in some
miraculous fashion, to preserve certain hospitable old customs.
Distinguished guests still sat at his table and ate ducks cooked to the
proper state of rareness, and terrapin in a chafing-dish, with a dash of
old sherry. If between these feasts there was famine the world never
knew.
It was perhaps from the colonel that Randolph had learned to make
poverty picturesque.
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