“Wall, wall! I never seen two bodies with one head till now. Why, it’s Master Dave! and his female bride!”
The farmer’s wife cackled at the wit of her spouse, and Patty giggled with well-bred reserve. She treated the old rustics with the manner she held toward the blacks who had been her father’s slaves when she was younger. But though the Albesons were quick to remind any presumptuous prigs that they were as good as royalty in the great and only republic, they found Patty’s tyranny as pretty as a baby’s.
They led the way into the house. David’s black man Cuff took the horses to the stable, and Patty’s brown woman Teen carried the luggage up the steps and up the stairs to the long, lone room under the eaves, that grazed the four high tops of bedposts carved as if the mahogany had been twisted or braided.
The first duty was to wash off the dust of the travel. When Patty lifted the scuttle hat from the clutter of her curls before the mirror, she screamed with dismay:
“I’m blacker than Teen!”
RoBards himself poured water into the bowl and boasted of its clarity.
“Not much like the soup you get from your city cisterns, eh?”
“It’s cold, though,” she murmured.
She put him out of the room while she changed her dress to a simple, loose house-robe. She slipped out of the steel cuirass of her stays, and the soft sleeves drooped from her shoulders along her arms. There was a girl’s body bewitchingly hinted inside the twinkling wrinkles.
After the return to simple, clinging things of the brief French republic and the early Empire, the fashions had been departing more and more from any respect for God’s image beneath. When Patty came down the steps in something that was rather drapery than a group of balloons, RoBards was amazed to find how human she was after all, how Grecian, somehow; how much quainter, littler, dearer.