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 everything 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, may be, nearer correct than they knew.
They rarely saw her save when she went to or returned from church; a small, rather tired-looking, dark quadroone of very good features and a gentle thoughtfulness of expression which it would take long to describe: call it a widow's look.
In speaking of Madame Delphine's house, mention should have been made of a gate in the fence on the Royal-street sidewalk.