ow do you do, Carmella?” said Mrs. Barrington, appraising the sturdy little black-haired picture of self-confidence at a glance, quite as she had appraised social leaders through recent years. Or so she thought. She might learn later that her trained inventory had overlooked some few factors that were outside her own reactions.
“I’m very well, thank you, Mrs. Barrington,” answered Carmella quietly. “How do you do, Mrs. Barrington?”
A deep reader of racial riddles would try to interpret deeply the slight—the very slight emphasis on Carmella’s “you” as she asked after Mrs. Barrington’s health. But the deep reader would be wrong. It was not even symbolic, save as the child herself symbolized a swift decade dieted in a faster school of life than Mrs. Barrington’s forty-one years could match.
Carmella, to put it simply, was merely trying to be polite—which to her meant returning whatever seemed to her to be tit for whatever seemed to her to be tat. It is an old, old rule.
[15]
