Explore "Transplanted" by Gertrude Atherton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Marguerite Tarleton's impression of the hour in which she found herself widowed and penniless was very vague; she was down with brain fever in the hour that followed.
The Civil War had left her family with little but the great prestige of its name and the old house in New Orleans. Nevertheless, the house slaves having refused to accept their freedom, Marguerite had "never picked up her handkerchief," when, in a gown fashioned by her mammy from one of her dead mother's, she made her début in a society which retained all of its pride and little of its gaiety. Her mother had been a creole of great beauty and fascination. Marguerite inherited her impulsiveness and vivacity; and, for the rest, was ethereally pretty, as dainty and fastidious as a young princess, and had the soft manner and the romantic heart of the convent maiden. Hayward Tarleton captured twelve dances on this night of her triumphant début, and proposed a week later. They were married within the month; he had already planned to seek for fortune in California with what was left of his princely inheritance.