"Except its dome. I hear there's a movement----
"Yes, to save that. I hope 'twill succeed. To me that old dome is a monument of those two men."
"But if it comes down the home remains, opposite, where both were born, were they not?"
"Yes. Yet I'd rather the dome. We Creoles, you know, are called very conservative."
"Yet no race is more radical than the French."
"True. And we Chapdelaines have always been radical. Grandpère was, though a slaveholder."
"Oh, none of my ancestors justified slavery, yet as planters they had to own negroes."
"But the Chapdelaines were not planters. They were agents of ships. Fifty times on one page in the old Picayune, or in L'Abeille--'For freight or passage apply to the master on board or to T. Chapdelaine & Son, agents.' Even then there were two Théophiles, and grandpapa was the son. They were wholesale agents also for French exporters of artistic china, porcelain, glass, bronze. Twice they furnished the hotel with everything of that kind; when it first opened, and when it changed hands. That's how they came to hold stock in it. Grandpapa, outdoor man of the firm, was every day in the rotunda, under that dome."
"Yes," Chester said, "it was a kind of Rialto, I know. They called it the 'Exchange,' as earlier they had called Maspero's."
"You love our small antiquities. So do I. Well, grandpapa did much business there, both of French goods and of ships; and because the hotel was the favorite of the sugar-planters its rotunda was one of the principal places for slave auctions."