“Ladies at home?  Yassuh,” he said, with an ecstasy as if he announced the world’s war suddenly over, all oceans safe, all peoples free.  He led the way up the cramped white-shell walk with a ceremonial precision that gave the caller time to notice the garden.  It was hardly an empire.  It lay on either side in two right-angled figures, each, say, of sixty by fourteen feet, every foot repeating florally the smile of the child.  The rigid beds were curbed with brick water-painted as red as Cupid’s gums.  The three fences were green with vines, and here and there against them bloomed tall evergreen shrubs.  At one upper corner of the main path was a camellia and at the other a crape-myrtle, symbols respectively, to the visitor, of Aunt Corinne and Aunt Yvonne.  The brick doorstep smiled as red as the garden borders, and as he reached the open door Aline, with her two aunts at her back, received him.

“Mr. Chester—­Mlle. Chapdelaine.  Mr. Chester—­my Aunt Yvonne.”  Never had the niece seemed quite so fair—­in face, dress, figure, or mental poise.  She wore that rose whose petals are deep red in their outer circle and pass from middle pink to central white and deepen in tints with each day’s age.  If that rose could have been a girl, mind, soul, and all, a Creole girl, there would have been two on one stem.

And there, on either side of her sat the aunts:  the elder much too lean, the younger much too dishevelled, and both as sun-tanned as harvesters, betraying their poverty in flimsy, faded gowns which the dismayed youth named to himself not draperies but hangings.  Yet they were sweet-mannered, fluent, gay, cordial, and unreserved, though fluttering, twittering, and ultra-feminine.

The room was like the pair.  “Doubtlezz Aline she’s told you ab-out that ’ouse.  No?  Ah, chere! is that possible?  ’Tis an ancient relique, that ‘ouse.  At the present they don’t build any mo’ like that ’ouse is build’!  You see those wall’, those floor’?  Every wall they are not of lath an’ plazter, like to-day; they are of solid plank’ of a thicknezz of two-inch’—­and from Kentucky!”

The guest recognized the second-hand lumber of broken-up flatboats.

“Tha’z a genuine antique, that ‘ouse!  Sometime’ we think we ought to egspose that ‘ouse, to those tourist’, admission ten cent’.” [A gay laugh.]

“But tha’z only when Aline want’ to compel us to buy some new dresses.  And tha’z pritty appropriate, that antique ‘ouse, for two sizter’ themselve’ pritty antique—­ha, ha, ha!—­as well as their anceztors.”

“I fancy they’re from ’way back,” said Chester.

“We are granddaughter’ of two emigres of the Revolution.  The other two they were decapitalize’ on that gui’otine.  Yet, still, ad the same time, we don’t feel antique.  We don’t feel mo’ than ten year’!  And especially when we are showing those souvenir’ of our in-fancy.  And there is nothing we love like that.”