“Oh, Pau.”  She said no more than this, but Welles had the impression that these words somehow had made a comment on Vincent’s information.  Vincent seemed to think so too, and curiously enough not to think it a very favorable comment.  He looked, what he almost never looked, a little nettled, and spoke a little stiffly.  “It’s a very fine specimen,” he said briefly, looking again at the photograph.

“Oh, it looks very much finer and bigger in the photograph than it really is,” she told them.  “It’s only a bandbox of a thing compared with Coucy or Pierrefonds or any of the northern ones.  It was built, you know, like the Cathedral at Bayonne, when the Plantagenets still held that country, but after they were practically pretty near English, and both the chateau and the Gothic cathedral seem queer aliens among the southern natives.  I have the photograph up there on the wall only because of early associations.  I lived opposite it long ago when I was a little girl.”

This, to Mr. Welles, was indistinguishable from the usual talk of people who have been “abroad.”  To tell the truth they always sounded to him more or less “showing-off,” though he humbly tried to think it was only because he could never take any part in such talk.  He certainly did not see anything in the speech to make Vincent look at her, almost with his jaw dropped.  He himself paid little attention to what she was now saying, because he could not keep his mind from the lingering sweet intonations of her voice.  What difference did it make where she had lived as a little girl?  She was going to live next door to him now; what an awfully nice woman she was, and quite a good-looking woman too, with a very nice figure, although not in her very first youth, of course.  How old could she be?  Between thirty and forty of course, but You couldn’t tell where.  His personal taste was not for such a long face as hers.  But you didn’t notice that when she smiled.  He liked the way she did her black hair, too, so smooth and shining and close to her head.  It looked as though she’d really combed and brushed it, and most women’s hair didn’t.

She turned to him now, again, and said, “Is this your very first call in Ashley?  Because if it is, I mustn’t miss the opportunity to cut in ahead of all the other gossips, and give you a great deal of information.  You might just as well have it all in one piece now, and get it straight, as take it in little snippets from old Mrs. Powers, when she comes to bring your milk, this evening.  You see I know that you are to get your milk of the Powers, and that they have plucked up courage to ask you eight cents a quart although the price around here has been, till now, six cents.  You’ll be obliged to listen to a great many more details from Mrs. Powers than from me, even those she knows nothing about.  But of course you must be introduced to the Powers, in toto too.  Old Mrs. Powers, a very lively old widow, lives on her farm nearly