Not that Councilman Bouille's rebuttals had been any more dignified in tone, particularly after Granger had accused him of not even speaking good French.

January shook his head, and slid into the bright measures of Le Pantalon. The crowd swirled, coalesced, divided into double sets of couples in a rather elongated ring around the walls of the long ballroom. Creole with Creole, American with American, foreign French with foreign French... Bonapartist with Bonapartist, for all he knew.

He saw the young Prussian fencing master emerge from the passageway to the other ballroom, the offending newspaper tucked under one arm, and scan the crowd, like a scar-faced, beak-nosed heron in Renaissance velvet and pearls. The purple pirate stepped through the curtain behind him and conferred with him rapidly-a silk scarf covered the corsair's hair but nothing in the world could prevent his copper-colored Vandyke from looking anything but awful in contrast. Then Mayerling moved off through the crowd to speak with Granger, who had clearly brushed aside the encounter and was asking Agnes Pellicot if one of her daughters would favor him with a dance.

Agnes looked him up and down with an eye that would have killed a snap bean crop overnight and made excuses. January had heard his mother remark that her friend would have her work cut out for her to successfully dispose of Marie-Anne, Marie-Rose, Marie-Therese, and Marie-Niege, but Kaintucks were Kaintucks.

Her own protector having crossed over to join his fiancee in the Theatre, Phlosine Seurat waved, and Mayerling joined her in a set with a very young, fair, chinless boy in a twenty-dollar gray velvet coat.

The tide of the music drew January in-the "tour des mains," the "demi promenade," the "chaine an-glaise"-and for a time it, and the joy of the dancers, was all that existed for him.