dawning fancy dispelled
by the fact that Harding had not proposed, and the cutting words she had
addressed to the girl were the result of the nervous irritation caused
by the marked attention the Marquis was paying Violet Scully.

For, like Alice, Mrs. Barton never lived long in a fool's paradise, and
she now saw that the battle was going against her, and would most
assuredly be lost unless a determined effort was made. So she delayed
not a moment in owning to herself that she had committed a mistake in
going to the Shelbourne Hotel. Had she taken a house in Mount Street or
Fitzwilliam Place, she could have had all the best men from the barracks
continually at her house. But at the hotel she was helpless; there were
too many people about, too many beasts of women criticizing her conduct.
Mrs. Barton had given two dinner-parties in a private room hired for the
occasion; but these dinners could scarcely be called successful. On one
occasion they had seven men to dinner, and as some half-dozen more
turned in in the evening, it became necessary to send down to the
ladies' drawing-room for partners. Bertha Duffy and the girl in red of
course responded to the call, but they had rendered everything odious by
continuous vulgarity and brogue. Then other mistakes had been made. A
charity costume ball had been advertised. It was to be held in the
Rotunda. An imposing list of names headed the prospectus, and it was
confidently stated that all the lady patronesses would attend. Mrs.
Barton fell into the trap, and, to her dismay, found herself and her
girls in the company of the rag, tag, and bobtail of Catholic Dublin:
Bohemian girls fabricated out of bed-curtains, negro minstrels that an
application of grease and burnt cork had brought into a filthy
existence. And from the single gallery that encircled this tomb-like
building the small tradespeople looked down upon the multicoloured crowd
that strove to dance through the mud that a late Land League meeting had
left upon the floor; and all the while grey dust fell steadily into the
dancers' eyes and into the sloppy tea distributed at counters placed
here and there like coffee-stands in the public street.

'I never felt so low in my life,' said the lady who always brought back
an A.D.C. from the Castle, and the phrase was cited afterwards as being
admirably descriptive of the festival.

When it became known that the Bartons had been present at this ball,
that the beauty had been s