"Poor things! I just know they have a hard time getting along," sighed Dee. "They look so frail and underfed. Just look back at their house! It is simply huge. And look at their porches! Big enough for skating rinks! Do you suppose those two little old ladies live there all by themselves?"
"I fancy they must have a lot of servants," ventured Dum.
"Of course they haven't any or they wouldn't be buying shrimps themselves. They live all alone in that great house and eat a dime's worth of shrimps a day. They have just been off burying their last relative who did not leave them a small legacy that they have, in a perfectly decent and ladylike way, been looking forward to. I have worked out their whole plot and mean to write 'em up some day."
"Oh, Page, you are so clever! Do you really think that is the truth about them? What are they going to do now?" asked Dum.
"Do? Why, of course they are going to take boarders, 'paying guests.' Don't you know that there are only two ways for a Charleston lady to make a living? The men have three according to his Eminence of the Tum Tum. Women as usual get the hot end of it and there are only two for them: taking boarders and teaching school."
"Well, I only wish we could go board there. I am dying to get into one of these old houses. I bet they are lovely. Did you notice they had an ugly, new, unpainted, board gate? I wonder where their wrought-iron one is. They must have had one sometime. Their house looks as though a beautiful gate must have gone with it." Dum had an eye open for artistic things and the iron gate had taken her fancy more than anything we had yet seen in Charleston.
"When I write them up I am going to use that, too, in my story. Of course they sold the gate to some of the parvenu Yankees, that the old gentleman scorned so. I can write a thrilling account of their going out at night to bid the beautiful gates good-by forever, those gates that had played such an important part in their lives. Through their portals many a coach (claret-colored, I think, I will have the coaches be) has rolled, bearing to their revels the belles of the sixties. (Everyone in the sixties was a belle.) I have an idea that the smaller Miss Laurens was once indiscreet enough to kiss her lover through the bars of that gate but the taller one never got further than letting her young man lightly touch her lily hand with his lips."
"Oh, Page, you are so ridiculous to make up all of that about two snuffy old ladies. Now I want you to write a real story about Claire and her brother Louis. I am sure they are interesting without making up. I still wish I could see Louis. I'd tell him to spunk up and go dig for the nice people all he wants to. I know they are nice if they are only twice removed from a pick and shovel, according to old Mr. Gaillard," said Dee, ever democratic.
We had reached the Battery, a beautiful spot with fine live-oaks and palmettos. Spanish moss hung in festoons from some of the trees. It was the first any of us had seen.
"They say it finally kills the trees if too much of it grows on them, but it is certainly beautiful," said Dum.