silent. The heart of a spinster of thirty-six is a well of
tolerance.

In the evening I went to the ball, where I kept close to my mother's
side. She gave me her arm with a devotion which did not miss its
reward. All the honors were for her; I was made the pretext for charming
compliments. She was clever enough to find me fools for my partners, who
one and all expatiated on the heat and the beauty of the ball, till you
might suppose I was freezing and blind. Not one failed to enlarge on the
strange, unheard-of, extraordinary, odd, remarkable fact--that he saw me
for the first time.

My dress, which dazzled me as I paraded alone in my white-and-gold
drawing-room, was barely noticeable amidst the gorgeous finery of most
of the married women. Each had her band of faithful followers, and they
all watched each other askance. A few were radiant in triumphant
beauty, and amongst these was my mother. A girl at a ball is a mere
dancing-machine--a thing of no consequence whatever.

The men, with rare exceptions, did not impress me more favorably here
than at the Champs-Elysees. They have a used-up look; their features
are meaningless, or rather they have all the same meaning. The proud,
stalwart bearing which we find in the portraits of our ancestors--men
who joined moral to physical vigor--has disappeared. Yet in this
gathering there was one man of remarkable ability, who stood out from
the rest by the beauty of his face. But even he did not rouse in me the
feeling which I should have expected. I do not know his works, and he is
a man of no family. Whatever the genius and the merits of a plebeian
or a commoner, he could never stir my blood. Besides, this man was
obviously so much more taken up with himself than with anybody else,
that I could not but think these great brain-workers must look on us as
things rather than persons. When men of intellectual power love, they
ought to give up writing, otherwise their love is not the real thing.
The lady of their heart does not come first in all their thoughts. I
seemed to read all this in the bearing of the man I speak of. I am told
he is a professor, orator, and author, whose ambition makes him the
slave of every bigwig.

My mind was made up on the spot. It was unworthy of me, I determined,
to quarrel with society for not being impressed by my merits, and I gave
myself up to the simple pleasure of dancing, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
I heard a great deal of inept gossip about peop