“I see it is.”

“Mr. Chester, what you see, I think, is that my aunts are perhaps the two most—­well—­unworldly women you ever knew.”

“True.  In that quality they’re childlike.”

“Yes, and because they are so childlike in—­above all—­the freedom of their speech, what I want to say of them, just this one time, is the more to their honor:  that in my whole life I’ve never heard them speak one word against anybody.”

“Not even Cupid?”

“Ah-h-h! that’s a cruel joke, and false!  That true Cupid, he’s an assassin; while that child, he’s faultless?”

The speaker really said “fauklezz,” and it was a joy to Chester to hear her at last fall unwittingly into a Creole accent.  “Well, anyhow,” he led on, “the four lived together; and if I guess right your mother became, to all this joy-ride company, as much their heroine as your father was their hero.”

“’Tis true!”

“But your father’s coming back from France—­it couldn’t save the business?”

“Alas, no!  Even together, he and mamma—­and you know what a strong businezz partner a French wife can be—­they could not save it.  Both of them were, I think, more artist than merchant, and when all that kind of businezz began to be divorce’ from art and married to machinery”—­the narrator made a sad gesture.

“Kultur against culture, was it? and your father not the sort to change masters.”

“True again.  But tha’z not all; hardly was it half.  One thing beside was the miz-conduct of an agent, the man who lately”—­a silent smile.

“What?—­sold your aunts that manuscript?”

“Yes.  But he didn’ count the most.  Oh, the whole businezz, except papa’s, became, as we say—­give me the word!”

“Americanized?”

“No, papa he always refused to call it that.  Mr. Chester, he used to say that those two marvellouz blessings, machinery, democracy, they are in one thing too much alike; they are, at first—­say it, you.”

“Vulgarizing?”

“Yes.  I suppose that has to be—­at the first, h’m?  And with the buying world every day more and more in love with machine work—­and seeming itself to become machine work, while at the same time Americanized, papa was like a river town”—­another gesture—­“left by the river!”

“Yet he never went into bankruptcy?  You can point with pride to that, mademoiselle.”

“Ah, Mr. Chester, pride!  Once I pointed, and papa—­’My daughter, there are many ways to go bankrupt worse than in money, and to have gone bankrupt in none of them—­’ there he stopped; he was too noble for pride.  No, the businezz, juz’ year after year it starved to death.  In the early days grandpere had two big stores, back to back; whole-sale, Chartres Street; retail, Royal, where now all that is left of it is the shop of Mme. Alexandre.  Both her husband and she were with papa in the retail store,