bold eyes away up to
her face and pour forth their admiration in a universal--"Ah-h-h-h!"

But, mark you, she was good Madame Delicieuse as well as fair Madame
Delicieuse: her principles, however, not constructed in the austere
Anglo-Saxon style, exactly (what need, with the lattice of the
Confessional not a stone's throw off?). Her kind offices and beneficent
schemes were almost as famous as General Villivicencio's splendid alms;
if she could at times do what the infantile Washington said he could
not, why, no doubt she and her friends generally looked upon it as a
mere question of enterprise.

She had charms, too, of intellect--albeit not such a sinner against time
and place as to be an "educated woman"--charms that, even in a plainer
person, would have brought down the half of New Orleans upon one knee,
with both hands on the left side. _She_ had the _whole_ city at her
feet, and, with the fine tact which was the perfection of her character,
kept it there contented. Madame was, in short, one of the kind that
gracefully wrest from society the prerogative of doing as they please,
and had gone even to such extravagant lengths as driving out in the
_Americain_ faubourg, learning the English tongue, talking national
politics, and similar freaks whereby she provoked the unbounded worship
of her less audacious lady friends. In the centre of the cluster of
Creole beauties which everywhere gathered about her, and, most of all,
in those incomparable companies which assembled in her own splendid
drawing-rooms, she was always queen lily. Her house, her drawing-rooms,
etc.; for the little brown aunt who lived with her was a mere piece of
curious furniture.

There was this notable charm about Madame Delicieuse, she improved by
comparison. She never looked so grand as when, hanging on General
Villivicencio's arm at some gorgeous ball, these two bore down on you
like a royal barge lashed to a ship-of-the-line. She never looked so
like her sweet name, as when she seated her prettiest lady adorers close
around her, and got them all a-laughing.

Of the two balconies which overhung the _banquette_ on the front of the
Delicieuse house, one was a small affair, and the other a deeper and
broader one, from which Madame and her ladies were wont upon gala days
to wave handkerchiefs and cast flowers to the friends in the
processions. There they gathered one Eighth of January morning to see
the military display. It was a bright blue day, a