There
was to be a happy renaissance; a purging out of Yankee ideas; a blessed
home-coming of those good old Bourbon morals and manners which Yankee
notions had expatriated. In the cheerfulness of their anticipations they
even went the length of throwing their feet high in air, thus indicating
how the Villivicencio ticket was going to give "doze Americains" the
kick under the nose.
In the three or four weeks which followed, the General gathered a
surfeit of adulation, notwithstanding which he was constantly and with
pain imagining a confused chatter of ladies, and when he shut his eyes
with annoyance, there was Madame Delicieuse standing, and saying, "I
knew not a reason why you should be angry against your son," gazing in
his face with hardened simplicity, and then--that last scene on the
stairs wherein he seemed still to be descending, down, down.
Madame herself was keeping good her resolution.
"Now or never," she said, "a reconciliation or a quarrel."
When the General, to keep up appearances, called again, she so moved him
with an account of certain kindly speeches of her own invention, which
she imputed to Dr.
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