"Did anybody call?" she asked, and asked several times in crescendo.
"Only Mrs. Enslee, ma'am," he whispered, in his dry, cackling, deaf man's voice.
Persis cast her eyes up in despair and hastened to pay her devoirs to her mother-in-law. The elder Mrs. Enslee was looking radiantly beautiful in her white hair and her black eyes and the assisted red of her Spanish lips, with her cascade of furs falling about her.
She smiled at Persis sadly. Her daughter-in-law was beautiful undeniably. What a pity that she was not also good! But she kept back her reproaches, and said in the most delicate of accents, with her tendency to an exquisite lisp:
"Don't worry, my dear. It's only a duty call."
"Won't you stop to dinner?" Persis urged. "We're only going to have a bite. We're dining early and hurrying away to the opera. Willie is determined to hear the overture and the first act. I dote on 'Carmen,' but I've never been in time for the first of it."
"'Carmen!'" Mrs. Enslee sniffed. "That old slander on my race—as if Spanish women were all faithless!"
"But if it's Carmen for Spain," Persis said, "it's Camille for France, and Becky Sharp for England, and—who for America?"
"Hester Prynne, perhaps."
"Oh yes," laughed Persis. "Even the Puritans had their scandals; but she was a grass-widow, and the town was so dull, and the preacher so handsome. Can you blame her?"