"The world? Nonsense! The world doesn't know there's such a person in
it. She was forgotten forty years ago, only she has grown so selfish in
her grief that she can never believe it."

The old man sighed and shook his head. "The women of this generation
have had the dew brushed off them," he lamented, "but your mother
understood. She felt for Angela."

"And yet it was an old story when my mother came here."

"Some things never grow old, my dear, and shame is one of them."

Laura dismissed the assertion with a shrug of scornful protest, and
turned the conversation at once into another channel. "Am I anything
like my mother, Uncle Percival?" she asked abruptly.

For a moment the old man pondered the question in silence, his little
red hands fingering the mouth of his flute.

"You have the Creole hair and the Creole voice," he replied; "but for
the rest you are your father's child, every inch of you."

"My mother was beautiful, I suppose?"

"Your father thought so, but as for me she was too little and
passionate. I can see her now when she would fly into one of her spasms
because somebody had crossed her or been impolite without knowing it."

"They got on badly then--I mean afterward."