IX


HER HARPOON STRIKES

The home of the Callenders was an old Creole colonial plantation-house,
large, square, strong, of two stories over a stoutly piered basement,
and surrounded by two broad verandas, one at each story, beneath a great
hip roof gracefully upheld on Doric columns. It bore that air of
uncostly refinement which is one of the most pleasing outward features
of the aloof civilization to which it, though not the Callenders,
belonged.

Inside, its aspect was exceptional. There the inornate beauty of its
finish, the quiet abundance of its delicate woodwork, and the high
spaciousness and continuity of its rooms for entertainment won
admiration and fame. A worthy setting, it was called, for the gentle
manners with which the Callenders made it alluring.

They, of course, had not built it. The late Judge had acquired it from
the descendants of a planter of indigo and coffee who in the oldest
Creole days had here made his home and lived his life as thoroughly in
the ancient baronial spirit as if the Mississippi had been the mediaeval
Rhine. Only its perfect repair was the Judge's touch, a touch so
modestly true as to give it a charm of age and story which the youth and
beauty of the Callender ladies only enhanced, enhancing it the more