start they began to play her, in their social world, as their best
card--when they could. She had her hours of school and of home study;
also her music, both lessons and practice; was in earnest both as to
books and violin, and had teachers who also were in earnest; and so
she found little time for social revels. Almost all sociality is revel
in New-Orleans society, and especially in the society she met.

But when she did appear, somehow she shone. A native instinct in
dress,--even more of it than her mother had at the same age,--and in
manners and speech, left only so little rusticity as became itself a
charm rather than a blemish, suggested the sugar-cane fields; the
orange-grove; the plantation-house, with pillared porch, half-hidden
in tall magnolias and laurestines and bushes of red and white
camellias higher and wider than arms can reach, and covered with
their regal flowers from the ground to their tops; and the bayou front
lined with moss-draped live-oaks, their noonday shadows a hundred feet
across. About her there was not the faintest hint of the country
tavern. She was but in her seventeenth year; but on her native
prairies, where girls are women at fourteen, seventeen was almost an
advanced stage of decay. She seemed full nineteen, and a very
well-equipped nineteen as social equipments went in the circle she had
entered. Being a schoolgirl was no drawback; there are few New-Orleans
circles where it is; and especially not in her case, for she needed
neither to titter nor chatter,--she could talk. And then, her violin
made victory always easy and certain.

Sometimes the company was largely of down-town Creoles; sometimes of
up-town people,--"Americans;" and often equally of the two sorts,
talking French and English in most amusing and pleasing confusion. For
the father of the family had lately been made president of a small
bank, and was fairly boxing the social compass in search of
depositors. Marguerite had not yet discovered that--if we may drag the
metaphor ashore--to enter society is not to emerge upon an unbroken
table-land, or that she was not on its highest plateau. She noticed
the frequency with which she encountered unaccomplished fathers,
stupid mothers, rude sons and daughters, and ill-distributed personal
regard; but she had the common-sense not to expect more of society
than its nature warrants, guessed rightly that she would find the
same thing anywhere else, and could not know that these eleme