With this laughing admonition a tall active giantesco sprang into the howdah, and seizing a sprightly medium woman by the shoulders, as she was about to embrace Uffea, turned her briskly round, with the exclamation, “Now for some system? I am ashamed of you, Olui! Where is your boasted presence of mind and pity? and voice, so easily aroused in gratuitous sympathy for your Giga auramentees? Do you suppose that this little handful of women can withstand the battery of Coliseo’s thousands, softly placable as they are, without having their lips and faces flayed? Now Signorina Manatitliana, this is my wife Oluissandra Peasiffea, of the twelfth generation in descent from the Peasiffeas of Maniculæ,—that is, I am, and she shares my loving pedigree, with a worthy merit that exceeds my own.”
Before the last clause, Uffea had embraced the wife of the Coliseo prætor with cousinly warmth. The husband laughingly thanked her for honoring his spouse with such affectionate returns upon the strength of relationship, but hoped that the slight deviation from the “giga lineal” would not prove a bar to the full expression of loving confidence. This diversion set the women’s tongues in motion, with trills and fugues, which were followed by the men’s deeper tones, in more measured accents of curious inquiry. With the sun’s decline all united in a hymn of thanksgiving. As the gathering shades of twilight deepened, Oluissandra reminded her husband that the Manatitlan howdahs were poorly adapted for the reception of the prætor of Coliseo’s guests upon an occasion so extraordinary? “If the public records are to be trusted,” she said, “they will bear testimony that it has been customary for the chief magisters to offer their guests the hospitality of their houses. It will hardly consort with precedent, if the scribe should in record addenda state that the prætor Peasiffea entertained his Manatitlan relatives in their own howdahs, at the reunion of their peoples, after centuries of separation. I am sorry,” she continued, “that courtesy obliges me to give you this public reproof, but your ‘head and heart’ should have been on the alert to give a suitable welcome, as the long delay might conjure sensitive doubts questioning the sincerity of your joy.”