"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 seeming itself to become machine work, while at the same time Americanized, papa was like a river town"--another gesture--"left by the river!"
"Yet he never went into bankruptcy? You can point with pride to that, mademoiselle."
"Ah, Mr. Chester, pride! Once I pointed, and papa--'My daughter, there are many ways to go bankrupt worse than in money, and to have gone bankrupt in none of them--' there he stopped; he was too noble for pride. No, the businezz, juz' year after year it starved to death. In the early days grandpére had two big stores, back to back; whole-sale, Chartres Street; retail, Royal, where now all that is left of it is the shop of Mme. Alexandre. Both her husband and she were with papa in the retail store, until it diminish' that he couldn' keep them, and--in the time of President Roosevelt--some New York men they bought him out. Because a new head of the custom-house, old Creole friend of papa, without solicitation except maybe of M. Beloiseau and those, appointed him superintendent of customs warehouses, you know? where they keep all kind of imported goods, so they needn't pay the tariff till they take them out to sell them in the store? h'm?"