ner times.

Calumny had taken two forms: the monstrous black smoke of a vulgar
version and the superior divinings of the socially elect; a fine, hidden
flame fed from the smoke. According to the vulgate the three ladies,
incensed at a perfectly lawful effort to use their horses for the
Confederate evacuation and actually defying it with cocked revolver, had
openly abjured Dixie, renounced all purpose to fly to it and, denying
shelter to their own wounded, had with signal flags themselves guided
the conquering fleet past the town's inmost defenses until compelled to
desist by a Confederate shell in their roof. Unable to face an odium so
well earned they had clung to their hiding, glad of the blue camp in
their grove, living fatly on the bazaar's proceeds, and having high
times with such noted staff-officers as Major Greenleaf, their kindness
to whom in the days of his modest lieutenancy and first flight and of
his later parole and exchange, was not so hard now to see through.

Greenleaf had come back with General Banks when Banks had succeeded
Butler. Oppressed with military cares, he had barely time to be, without
scrutiny, a full believer in the Valcours' loyalty to the Union. Had
they not avowed it to him when to breathe it was peril, on that early
day when Irby's command became Kincaid's Battery, and in his days of
Parish Prison and bazaar? How well those words fitly spoken had turned
out! "Like apples of gold," sang Flora to the timorous grandmother, "in
wrappers of greenbacks."

All the more a believer was he because while other faithfuls were making
their loyalty earn big money off the government this genteel pair
reminding him, that they might yet have to risk themselves inside the
gray lines again to extricate Charlie, had kept their loyalty as
gracefully hidden as of old except from a general or two. Preoccupied
Greenleaf, amiable generals, not to see that a loyalist in New Orleans
stood socially at absolute zero, whereas to stand at the social
ebullition point was more to the Valcours than fifty Unions, a hundred
Dixies and heaven beside. It was that fact, more than any other, save
one, which lent intrepidity to Flora's perpetual, ever quickening dance
on the tight-rope of intrigue; a performance in which her bonny face had
begun to betray her discovery that she could neither slow down nor dance
backward. However, every face had come to betray some cruel strain;
Constance's, Anna's, even Victorine's almond e