The next morning she set out with dispatch to carry out her plan. She went to see Zenie Thompson.
She found that much maligned and misunderstood woman cheerily rocking her leisure away at the front door of her home. The air was warm and Zenie had, contrary to the tenets of her race's religion, thrown open all the front of her house, windows and all. The neck of her waist, which was a very old white one of Mary Louise's, was likewise frankly open, and as there was considerable difference in the respective sizes, Zenie seemed on the point of bursting from its doubtful whiteness into all her full-blown coffee-coloured creamness. She hastily pinned up the bosom of it a little as Mary Louise turned in at her gate.
"How do, Mis' Ma'y Louise," she beamed, rising to her feet and holding her offspring clutched at a precarious angle to her shoulder. She stood with one hand resting on the doorpost and in her eyes expectancy. "Won' you-all come in?"
"Just for a minute," said Mary Louise, refusing the proffered chair and giving the room a hasty, critical look. Even in that critical look she could find naught to criticize. The cabin was a small three-room affair, set back from the street, between two vacant old storehouses. Zeke had whitewashed it without and calcimined it within, and with the free air that circulated the place this treatment was enough to make the front rooms passable. Over the iron mantel hung Zeke's "Knights of Macabre" sword in its scabbard. Mary Louise looked for the white-plumed hat but it had evidently been put away. On the left wall, in a brilliant gilt frame, hung a coloured portrait of Admiral Dewey. The artist had in some way inspired a look of malign cunning on the face by shifting the position of the left eye a hair's breadth below normal, but the mouth and smile were benign. On a table to the right reposed a glass case with a base of felt and a rounded top—the mausoleum for an ancient bird creature that looked like a prairie chicken, very droopy and, in spite of its interment, quite dingy with dust. It was vaguely familiar to her somehow.
Zenie was watching the inspection with an eager, expectant look. When Mary Louise had apparently finished and turned to her again, she smiled.
"You ain' eveh see ouh house befo', is you?"
Mary Louise admitted she never had. And then to disarm any suspicion that she might have come for social reasons only, she attacked the matter in hand with characteristic vigour:
"Zeke's not home much, is he?"
"Right smaht he ain', no'm." Zenie's face was all expectant smiles. Not a shadow seemed to linger near it.
Mary Louise allowed her gaze to travel about the room. In the entire atmosphere of the place was no besmirching suggestion of toil. She returned again to Zenie. The latter was like some tropical flower in full bloom. She began, selecting carefully her ground: "You haven't any place to put your baby, no one to watch him while you work, have you?" This was spoken with all the force of conviction.