Madame's very perfection was probably not easy to live up to.

"That was good, Mademoiselle Blanque. May I hear Mademoiselle Pauline on the Haydn now?" Their mother had been the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in New Orleans; Marie Delphine de McCarry's first husband a city intendant, a Spanish hidalgo of great wealth, and her second, Jean Blanque, a banker whose signature underwrote nearly every property deed in the city. Their two older sisters were the wives of two of the most influential men in the parish. With the early death of their little brother these girls became heiresses to a sizable fortune in city rents and land; to an unshakable position in Creole society; and to this huge and almost oppressively opulent house, with its gilded ceilings and French furniture, its marble stairs and crystal lighting fixtures.

But as he watched the older girl-a young woman, in truth, in her early twenties make an elaborate business of limping across the parlor to the most comfortable chair; clutching heavily on her sister's arm; sending Pauline to fetch a fan, a cushion, a kerchief, to call for Babette to fetch some lemonade from the kitchen-summoning Pauline back when she had gotten started on the Haydn march, because she suddenly felt faint and needed her vinaigrette-he knew Louise Marie would never marry. And Pauline? She was still what they would consider marriageable in any society, eighteen or nineteen, and would have been pretty had she not been so thin. Some wasting sickness there, thought January, studying her rigid profile with a physician's eye. Not consumption. Her color looked good, and she seemed to have no trouble drawing breath. An inability to digest certain foods, perhaps? Her hands were stick thin, wrist bones like hazelnuts standing out under the gold of her bracelets; her whole body seemed brittle, stiff as wood as she played, mechanically and badly. Resentment rose off Pauline like steam from the mosquito-wriggling gutters.