Although largely forgotten today, Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis had a long and commercially successful career as an editor, poet and writer of fiction and nonfiction. She wrote a popular history of Texas, Under Six Flags (1897), for young readers. She spent much of her youth on a cotton plantation in Texas and, after her marriage, settled in New Orleans and maintained a fashionable home on Royal Street.

“At La Glorieuse,” published in Harper's Monthly, was selected by William Dean Howells and Henry Mills Alden for inclusion in Shapes That Haunt the Dusk (1907), their collection of tales that occupy “the borderland between experience and illusion” (p. v.). As we have seen, E. Levi Brown's “At the Hermitage” also found its way into this useful and long-neglected anthology.

Davis's story creates its uncanny effect through a blend of glamor, nastiness and broken taboos. The ghost of a “soulless” woman haunts a shuttered ballroom and returns for seduction and revenge.

Text: William Dean Howells and Henry Mills Alden, eds, Shapes That Haunt the Dusk: Harper's Novelettes (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907), 177–222.

AT LA GLORIEUSE

Madame Raymonde-Arnault leaned her head against the back of her garden chair, and watched the young people furtively from beneath her half-closed eyelids. “He is about to speak,” she murmured under her breath; “she, at least, will be happy!” and her heart fluttered violently, as if it had been her own thin bloodless hand which Richard Keith was holding in his; her dark sunken eyes, instead of Félice's brown ones, which drooped beneath his tender gaze.

Marcelite, the old bonne, who stood erect and stately behind her mistress, permitted herself also to regard them for a moment with something like a smile relaxing her sombre yellow face; then she too turned her turbaned head discreetly in another direction.

The plantation house at La Glorieuse is built in a shining loop of Bayou L’Eperon. A level grassy lawn, shaded by enormous live-oaks, stretches across from the broad stone steps to the sodded levee, where a flotilla of small boats, drawn up among the flags and lily-pads, rise and fall with the lapping waves.