"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.