lliners. She was furnished by a certain
house there, just as one of a royal family would be at the present
day. As this had lasted from her layette up to her sixteenth year, it
may be imagined what took place when she determined to make her debut.
Then it was literally, not metaphorically, _carte blanche_, at least
so it got to the ears of society. She took a sheet of note-paper,
wrote the date at the top, added "I make my debut in November," signed
her name at the extreme end of the sheet, addressed it to her
dressmaker in Paris, and sent it. . . . . .

That she was admired, raved about, loved even, goes without saying.
After the first month she held the refusal of half the beaux of New
Orleans. Men did absurd, undignified, preposterous things for her: and
she? Love? Marry? The idea never occurred to her. She treated the most
exquisite of her pretenders no better than she treated her Paris
gowns, for the matter of that. She could not even bring herself to
listen to a proposal patiently; whistling to her dogs, in the middle
of the most ardent protestations, or jumping up and walking away with
a shrug of the shoulders, and a "Bah!"

Well! every one knows what happened after '59. There is no need to
repeat. The history of one is the history of all. . . . . . . . .

It might have been ten years according to some calculations, or ten
eternities,--the heart and the almanac never agree about time,--but
one morning old Champigny (they used to call him Champignon) was
walking along his levee front . . . when he saw a figure approaching.
He had to stop to look at it, for it was worth while. The head was
hidden by a green barege veil, which the showers had plentifully
besprinkled with dew; a tall thin figure. . . . She was the teacher of
the colored school some three or four miles away. "Ah," thought
Champigny, "some Northern lady on a mission." . . . Old Champigny
could not get over it that he had never seen her before. But he must
have seen her, and, with his abstraction and old age, not have
noticed her, for he found out from the negroes that she had been
teaching four or five years there. And he found out also--how, it is
not important--that she was Idalie Sainte Foy Mortemart des Islets.
_La grande demoiselle!_ He had never known her in the old days, owing
to his uncomplimentary attitude toward women, but he knew of her, of
course, and of her family. . . . .

Only the good God himself knows what passed in Champigny's min