ppleboro, was
still a beautiful woman, fair and rosy, with a profusion of _blonde
cendre_ curls just beginning to whiten, a sweet and arch face, and
eyes of clearest hazel, valanced with jet. She had been perhaps the
loveliest and most beloved woman of that proud and select circle which
is composed of families descended from the old noblesse, the most
exclusive circle of New Orleans society. And, as she said, nothing
could change nor alter the fact that no matter _what_ happened to us,
we were still De Rances!

"Ah! And was it, then, a De Rance who had the holy Mother of God
painted in a family picture, with a scroll issuing from her lips
addressing him as 'My Cousin'?" I asked, slyly.

"If it was, nobody in the world had a better right!" said she stoutly.

Thus the serene and unquestioning faith of their estimate of
themselves in the scheme of things, as evidenced by these Carolina
folk around her, caused Madame De Rance neither surprise nor
amusement. She understood. She shared many of their prejudices, and
she of all women could appreciate a pride that was almost equal to her
own. When they initiated her into the inevitable and inescapable
Carolina game of Matching Grandfathers, she always had a Roland for
their Oliver; and as they generally came back with an Oliver to match
her Roland, all the players retired with equal honors and mutual
respect. Every door in Appleboro at once opened wide to Madame De
Rance. The difference in religion was obviated by the similarity of
Family.

Fortunately, too, the Church and Parish House were not in the mill
district itself, a place shoved aside, full of sordid hideousness,
ribboned with railroad tracks, squalid with boarding-houses never free
from the smell of bad cooking, sinister with pawnshops, miserable with
depressingly ugly rows of small houses where the hands herded, and all
of it darkened by the grim shadow of the great red brick mills
themselves. Instead, our Church sits on a tree-shaded corner in the
old town, and the roomy white-piazza'd Parish House is next door,
embowered in the pleasantest of all gardens.

That garden reconciled my mother to her exile, for I am afraid she had
regarded Appleboro with somewhat of the attitude of the castaway
sailor toward a desert island--a refuge after shipwreck, but a desert
island nevertheless, a place which cuts off one from one's world. And
when at first the poor, uncouth, sullen creatures who were a part of
my new charge,