that day, and had not, in half the
houses of her dozen morning calls, sipped her sherry or set down her
little punch-glass empty of its delicious mixture of old spirits and
fermenting fruit-juices. Perhaps that sight sets you to thinking. You
may have been attracted earlier in the night by her delicate toilette
and her face pure as a pearl: you saw her later, warm from the dance,
eating and drinking in the supper-room: then her partner's arm was
round her waist, her head was on his shoulder, and she was plunging
into the German, whirling to maddening measures, presently caught in
a new embrace, flying from that man's arms to another's, growing wild
with the abandon of the figure, hair flying, dress disordered, powder
caked, face burning, till, pausing an instant for the champagne in
a servant's hands, your girl with the face as pure as a pearl seemed
nothing but a bacchante. And you ask yourself, "What is to be the end,
for her, of these midnights rich in every delight of vanity--the thin
slipper, the bare flesh, the brain loaded with false tresses, the
pores stopped with the dust of white and pink ball, the heated dance,
the indigestible banquet, the scanty sleep to get which she doses
herself nightly with some tremendous drug?" You wonder what emotions
are stimulated by the whirling dances, the rich dainties, the breath
of the exotics, the waltz-music, the common contact, the emulation of
dress, the unseasonable hours, the twice-breathed air, the everlasting
drams. "I saw Florimonde going the round of her half dozen parties the
other night," wrote a "looker-on in Venice" toward the close of the
last season. "What a resplendent creature she was, the hazel-eyed
beauty, with the faintest tinge of sunset hues on her oval cheeks!
Her dress was of that peculiar tarnished shade of pink--like yellow
sunshine suffusing a pale rose--which made the white shoulders rising
from it whiter and more polished yet; the panier and scarf were of
yellowest point lace; and a necklace of filigree and of large pale
topazes, each carved in cameo, illuminated the whole. Maudita went out
with Florimonde, too, that night, as she had gone every night for two
months before. Skirt over skirt of fluffy net flowed round Maudita,
and let their misty clouds blow about the trailing ornaments of long
green grasses and blue corn-flowers that she wore, while puffs and
falls half veiled the stomacher of Mexican turquoise and diamond
sparks, whose device imit