may not
like it. Perhaps we can keep it from offending by supposing that the
fact can be true only of the most elect socially, but in any case the
fact seemed to be that the men were handsomer than the women. They were
not only handsomer, but they were sweller (if we may use a comparative
hitherto unachieved) in look, and even in dress.

How this could have happened in a civilization so peculiarly devoted as
ours to the evolution of female beauty and style is a question which
must be referred to scientific inquiry. It does not affect the vast
average of woman's loveliness and taste among us in ranks below the
very highest; this remains unquestioned and unquestionable; and perhaps,
in the given instance, it was an appearance and not a fact, or perhaps
the joint spectator was deceived as to the supreme social value of those
rapidly dwindling and dissolving groups.

The reader and the writer were some time in finding their true level,
when they issued into the common life of the street, and they walked
home as much like driving home as they could. On the way the reader, who
was so remotely lost in thought that the writer could scarcely find him,
made himself heard in a musing suspiration: "There was something
missing. Can you think what it was?"

"Yes, certainly; there was no ballet."

"Ah, to be sure: no ballet! And there used always to be a ballet! You
remember," the reader said, "how beatific it always was to have the
minor coryphees subside in nebulous ranks on either side of the stage,
and have the great planetary splendor of the _prima ballerina_ come
swiftly floating down the centre to the very footlights, beaming right
and left? Ah, there's nothing in life now like that radiant moment! But
even that was eclipsed when she rose on tiptoe and stubbed it down the
scene on the points of her slippers, with the soles of her feet showing
vertical in the act. Why couldn't we have had that to-night? Yes, we
have been cruelly wronged."

"But you don't give the true measure of our injury. You forget that
supreme instant when the master-spirit of the ballet comes skipping
suddenly forward, and leaping into the air with calves that exchange a
shimmer of kisses, and catches the _prima ballerina_ at the waist, and
tosses her aloft, and when she comes down supports her as she bends this
way and that way, and all at once stiffens for her bow to the house.
Think of our having been defrauded of that!"

"Yes, we have been wicked