tellite.

A pleasing object. Smaller than ever. White-collared as ever, starched
and brushed to the sheen of a new penny and ugly of face as a
gargoyle--ugly as his goddess was beautiful. Not merely negroidal, in
lips, nose, ears, and tight black wool divided on the absolute equator;
not racially but uniquely ugly--till he smiled--and spoke. He smiled and
spoke with a joy of soul, a transparency of innocence, a rapture of love,
that made his ugliness positively endearing even apart from the entranced
recognition they radiated.

"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