Their household seemed likely to be a success. As cook they had an astonishingly broad-bosomed Frenchwoman, whom they called "La Grande Jeanne," and who immediately settled down like a sort of mother of the house; a tall, thin, and birdlike Frenchman named Pierre, who had been a soldier, and then for several years a servant at the Trappist Monastery at Staoueli; Charmian's maid; and an Arab boy whom everyone called Bibi, and who alternated between a demeanor full of a graceful and apparently fatalistic languor, and fits of almost monkeylike gaiety and mischief which Pierre strove to repress. A small Arab girl, dressed like a little woman in flowing cotton or muslin, with clinking bracelets and anklets, charms on her thin bosom and scarlet and yellow silk handkerchiefs on her braided hair, was also perpetually about the house and the courtyard. Neither Charmian nor Claude ever quite understood what had first led little Fatma there. She was some relation of Bibi's, had always known La Grande Jeanne, and seemed in some vague way to belong to the ancient house. Very soon they would have missed her had she gone. She was gentle, dignified, eternally picturesque. The courtyard roofed in by the bougainvillea would have seemed sad and deserted without her. Charmian had come away from England with enthusiasm, intent on the future. Till their departure life had been busy and complicated. She had had a thousand things to do, quantities of people to see; friends to whom she must say good-bye, acquaintances, dressmakers, modistes, tailors. Claude had been busy, too. He had been working at his orchestration for hours every day. Charmian had never interrupted him. It was her role to keep him to his work if he showed signs of flagging. But he had never shown such signs. London had hummed around them with its thousand suggestive voices; hinting, as if without intention and because it could not do otherwise, at a myriad interests, activities, passions. The great city had kept their minds, and even, so it seemed to Charmian and to Claude sometimes now in Africa, their hearts occupied. Now they confronted a solitary life in a strange country, in a _milieu_ where they had no friends, no acquaintances even, except two or three casually met in the Hotel St. George, and the British Consul-General and his wife, who had been to call on them.