ly beautiful, but it was the beauty of the octaroon. The large
eyes and the full, sensuous lips expressed with sombre emphasis the
great enigma of race. In her daughter this enigma had been transmuted
into an intensely personal thing, a seductive mystery that made men love
her at the same time that it overshadowed love and filled them with
anxiety for their spiritual safety. There was none of her radiant,
aggressive insouciance in the photograph. It was the portrait of a
clinging and rapacious female. A soft and delicious parasite, the
victim of an immense and tragic error. I heard Captain Macedoine, while
I sat with the photograph in my hand, telling of the almost incredible
happiness of his home life in the little wooden cottage amid the tall
grasses out on Tchoupitoulas Street. It all came back to me as I
listened. The clangour of the box-cars being switched where the trolley
bumped along the docks; the dry and dismal stretch of Poydras Street in
the evening, the stark warehouses of Calliope, and then mile on mile of
verandahed shabbiness, getting more and more open, with fields and
cross-roads running down into mere vague vacancies, or perhaps a shy,
solitary cottage. And the extraordinary sunsets over the lake--sunsets
like vast flat washes of crimson and gamboge and violet, which were
wiped out as by a hasty hand and left the wide-spaced _faubourgs_ a prey
to the murmurous onslaught of insects and the hollow boom of enormous
frogs. And the two women sat in rapt silence, absorbing the romantic
story with its romantic setting. An artificial story, if you like, as
everything about Captain Macedoine was artificial. It was almost as if
he had achieved his destiny by coming at last to that extraordinary
concoction of artificialities which we call New Orleans, where dead
civilizations lie superimposed one upon the other like leaves in a
rotten old book, where you can cut down through them, from the
mail-steamer and the trolley-car and the fake religion, right down to
the poisonous swamp and the Voodoo frenzy. It was a place whose very
silences were eloquent of sadness and frustrated achievement, and he
chose it as the scene of incredible happiness! For he conceived an
affection for the city which led him to say in so many words that it was
the only possible place to live, in the United States. His patrician
up-bringing and cosmopolitan career, it seems, had brought him to the
same view of our western civilization as Mrs. S