of judgment you are entering; the
court is in session; and if you move five steps forward, you will be at
its bar.

There was a tribunal once in France, as you may remember, called the
Chambre Ardente, the Burning Chamber. It was hung all round with lamps,
and hence its name. The burning chamber for the trial of young maidens
is the blazing ball-room. What have they full-dressed you, or rather
half-dressed you for, do you think? To make you look pretty, of course!
Why have they hung a chandelier above you, flickering all over with
flames, so that it searches you like the noonday sun, and your deepest
dimple cannot hold a shadow? To give brilliancy to the gay scene,
no doubt!--No, my clear! Society is inspecting you, and it finds
undisguised surfaces and strong lights a convenience in the process.
The dance answers the purpose of the revolving pedestal upon which the
"White Captive" turns, to show us the soft, kneaded marble, which looks
as if it had never been hard, in all its manifold aspects of living
loveliness. No mercy for you, my love! Justice, strict justice, you
shall certainly have,--neither more nor less. For, look you, there are
dozens, scores, hundreds, with whom you must be weighed in the balance;
and you have got to learn that the "struggle for life" Mr. Charles
Darwin talks about reaches to vertebrates clad in crinoline, as well
as to mollusks in shells, or articulates in jointed scales, or anything
that fights for breathing-room and food and love in any coat of fur or
feather! Happy they who can flash defiance from bright eyes and snowy
shoulders back into the pendants of the insolent lustres!

--Miss Mahala Crane did not have these reflections; and no young girl
ever did, or ever will, thank Heaven! Her keen eyes sparkled under
her plainly parted hair and the green de-laine moulded itself in those
unmistakable lines of natural symmetry in which Nature indulges a small
shopkeeper's daughter occasionally as well as a wholesale dealer's young
ladies. She would have liked a new dress as much as any other girl, but
she meant to go and have a good time at any rate.

The guests were now arriving in the drawing-room pretty fast, and the
Colonel's hand began to burn a good deal with the sharp squeezes which
many of the visitors gave it. Conversation, which had begun like a
summer-shower, in scattering drops, was fast becoming continuous, and
occasionally rising into gusty swells, with now and then a broad-ches