nk a sea without
a storm can be just as deep as with, h'm?"

XXXVII

"Well, they married, your father and mother, over there where her
people are fighting the Germans right now, and came and lived in
Bourbon Street with your aunts, eh?"

"Yes, or rather my aunts with them, they were of so much more strong
natures than my aunts--more strong and large while just as sweet, and
that's saying much, you know."

"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