I wish that I could understand, but I
cannot; except that father has made for us, for Pierre and Otille
and me, this little world at Fort o' God, and has taught us to
fear the other. I know that there is no other man in the whole
world like my father, and that what he has done must be best. It
is his pride that we bring your world to our doors, but that we
never go to it; he says that we know more about that world than
the people who live there, which of course cannot be so. And so we
have grown up amid the old memories, the pictures, and the dead
romances of Fort o' God. We have taken pleasure in living as we
do--in making for ourselves our own little social codes, our
childish aristocracy, our make-believe world. It is the spirit of
Fort o' God that lives with us, and makes us content; the shadow-
faces of men and women who once filled these rooms with life and
pleasure, and whose memory seems to have passed into our keeping
alone. I know them all; many of their names, all of their faces. I
have a daguerreotype of Camille Poitiers, and she must have been
very beautiful. There are the tiniest slippers in the world in her
chest, and ribbons like those which are tied about the pistols.
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