one.
She fell asleep over the complexity of the problem.

The next morning she set out with dispatch to carry out her plan. She
went to see Zenie Thompson.

She found that much maligned and misunderstood woman cheerily rocking
her leisure away at the front door of her home. The air was warm and
Zenie had, contrary to the tenets of her race's religion, thrown open
all the front of her house, windows and all. The neck of her waist,
which was a very old white one of Mary Louise's, was likewise frankly
open, and as there was considerable difference in the respective
sizes, Zenie seemed on the point of bursting from its doubtful
whiteness into all her full-blown coffee-coloured creamness. She
hastily pinned up the bosom of it a little as Mary Louise turned in at
her gate.

"How do, Mis' Ma'y Louise," she beamed, rising to her feet and holding
her offspring clutched at a precarious angle to her shoulder. She
stood with one hand resting on the doorpost and in her eyes
expectancy. "Won' you-all come in?"

"Just for a minute," said Mary Louise, refusing the proffered chair
and giving the room a hasty, critical look. Even in that critical look
she could find naught to criticize. The cabin was a small three-room
affair, set back from the street, between two vacant old storehouses.
Zeke had whitewashed it without and calcimined it within, and with the
free air that circulated the place this treatment was enough to make
the front rooms passable. Over the iron mantel hung Zeke's "Knights of
Macabre" sword in its scabbard. Mary Louise looked for the
white-plumed hat but it had evidently been put away. On the left wall,
in a brilliant gilt frame, hung a coloured portrait of Admiral Dewey.
The artist had in some way inspired a look of malign cunning on the
face by shifting the position of the left eye a hair's breadth below
normal, but the mouth and smile were benign. On a table to the right
reposed a glass case with a base of felt and a rounded top--the
mausoleum for an ancient bird creature that looked like a prairie
chicken, very droopy and, in spite of its interment, quite dingy with
dust. It was vaguely familiar to her somehow.

Zenie was watching the inspection with an eager, expectant look. When
Mary Louise had apparently finished and turned to her again, she
smiled.

"You ain' eveh see ouh house befo', is you?"

Mary Louise admitted she never had. And then to disarm any suspicion
that she might have come for social rea