'Theo, rouse yourself.'Tis nearly time for supper. Surely you wish to change your dress—though wait, I had almost forgot. You need a maid, of course. We no longer have to live like savages.'

He dapped his hands. Cato, his bodyservant, appeared and waited deferentially for orders.

'I ordered a maid sent from the Oaks for your mistress. Bring her here. Who is it, by the by?

'Venus, Maussa. Li'l Venus, Big Venus' gal. Li'l Venus she'm sma'test wench in de quarters.'

Joseph nodded dismissal.

Theo looked up, smiling a little. 'Oh, Joseph, must I really have a maid named Venus? I fear I shall laugh every time I see her black face.'

Her husband paid no attention to this attempt at frivolity. He was carefully brushing pomade into his cherished side whiskers preparatory to having Cato curl them, and he saw no point to her remark.

When Venus presented herself in a red-and-green cotton dress and bandanna, Theo felt no inclination to laugh, for the girl had the lithe grace of a tiger cat. Her skin, not black but copper-tinted, covered a face far different from the splaynosed, thick-lipped Gullahs. She was a Foulah, the Arabic strain plainly written in her aquiline nose and delicate bones. Her parents had been abducted, not from Angola like the Gullahs, but from the wild North African interior, twenty years ago, before Venus was born. After the first wild misery and rebellion they had accepted slavery in the strange new land, but Venus, who knew nothing else, had not.

She burned for freedom, her heart festered with resentment against the buckra. She hated them, and she hated her stupid companions in the 'street' of negro cabins at the Oaks, because they accepted their degradation so placidly. Almost she hated her parents, who had been chieftains in Africa, despising them for their quiescence.

She had come now under orders from the overseer to be maid to the new white mistress from the North. Her first rebellion had quieted when she realized that there would be advantages. She would learn buckra ways, she would insinuate herself craftily into their smug lives, until the time came when she could strike for freedom, perhaps even—far sweeter thought—for revenge.

Theo, knowing nothing of this, yet saw that her welcoming smile was tardily answered. She saw the look in the long sensual eyes slide from hers, while something inimical flickered in their depths. She felt rather than heard the hypocrisy in the slurring submissiveness of Venus's speech, and she knew from that first moment that her maid hated her. It scarcely mattered, she could dismiss the girl tomorrow: it was foolish to mind. But she did mind.