up a boy fitly?

Of the Rieppes, father and daughter, I also learned a little more. They
did not (most people believed) come from Georgia. Natchez and Mobile
seemed to divide the responsibility of giving them to the world. It was
quite certain the General had run away from Chattanooga. Nobody disputed
this, or offered any other battle as the authentic one. Of late the
Rieppes were seldom to be seen in Kings Port. Their house (if it had ever
been their own property, which I heard hotly argued both ways) had been
sold more than two years ago, and their recent brief sojourns in the town
were generally beneath the roof of hospitable friends--people by the name
of Cornerly, "whom we do not know," as I was carefully informed by more
than one member of the St. Michael family. The girl had disturbed a number
of mothers whose sons were prone to slip out of the strict hereditary
fold in directions where beauty or champagne was to be found; and the
Cornerlys dined late, and had champagne. Miss Hortense had "splurged it"
a good deal here, and the measure of her success with the male youth was
the measure of her condemnation by their female elders.

Such were the facts which I gathered from women and from the few men whom
I saw in Kings Port. This town seemed to me almost as empty of men as if
the Pied Piper had passed through here and lured them magically away to
some distant country. It was on the happy day that saw Miss Eliza La Heu
again providing me with sandwiches and chocolate that my knowledge of the
wedding and the bride and groom began really to take some steps forward.

It was not I who, at my sequestered lunch at the Woman's Exchange, began
the conversation the next time. That confection, "Lady Baltimore," about
which I was not to worry myself, had, as they say, "broken the ice"
between the girl behind the counter and myself.