The magnates of government,--municipal, state, federal,--those of the army, of the learned professions and of the clubs,--in short, the white male aristocracy in every thing save the ecclesiastical desk,--were there.
Tickets were high-priced to insure the exclusion of the vulgar.

No distinguished stranger was allowed to miss them.

They were beautiful! They were clad in silken extenuations from the throat to the feet, and wore, withal, a pathos in their charm that gave them a family likeness to innocence.
Madame Delphine, were you not a stranger, could have told you all about it; though hardly, I suppose, without tears.
But at the time of which we would speak (1821-22) her day of splendor was set, and her husband--let us call him so for her sake--was long dead.

He was an American, and, if we take her word for it, a man of noble heart and extremely handsome; but this is knowledge which we can do without.
Even in those days the house was always shut, and Madame Delphine's chief occupation and end in life seemed to be to keep well locked up in-doors.

She was an excellent person, the neighbors said,--a very worthy person; and they were, maybe, nearer correct then they knew.