From "Mutual Promises" they whirled into "A Trip to Paris." The ladies laughed and skipped in their bellshaped skirts, their enormous lace-draped sleeves that stood out ten inches from their arms; gentlemen flirted decorously as they held out white-gloved hands to white-gloved hands. Mr. Greenaway of the pomaded curls hovered protectively around the wealthy Widow Redfern, fetching her crepes and tarts and lemonade and presumably soothing her not-very-evident grief while she talked business with Granville the banker. Granville himself showed surprising lightness of step in dancing with his drab little pear-shaped wife and with every pretty maid and matron on the American side of the room. From the sideline, Mrs. Pritchard watched with resigned envy.

The American ladies all seemed plainer than their French counterparts, duller, an effect January knew wasn't entirely owing to having less sense of dress. No American lady would be seen in public, even at a ball, in the rice powder and rouge that no Creole lady would be seen without. It seemed to him, too, that they laughed less. He supposed if he were a woman married to an American he wouldn't laugh much, either.

St.-Denis Janvier had sent him to study with an Austrian music master, a martinet who had introduced to him the complex and disciplined joys of technique. Music had always been the safe place to which his soul had gone as a child: joining in the work-hollers, picking out harmonies, inventing songs about big storms or his aunt Jemma's red beans or the time Danro from the next plantation had fallen in love with Henriette up at the big house. All of this, Herr Kovald had said, was what savages did, who knew no better. Kovald had played for him that first time the Canon of Pachelbel-and January's soul had entered onto that magic road, that quest for beauty that had no end.