deep and
solemn. A tall man, with a face in which melancholy seems to be giving
way to despair, a man most proper for an undertaker, but palpably out
of place in a drawing-room, walks up and down incessantly, but
noiselessly, in a persistent endeavor to bring out a dance. Now he
fastens upon a newly arrived man. Now he plants himself before a bench
of misses. You can hear the low rumble of his exhortation and the
tittering replies. After a persevering course of entreaty and
persuasion, a set is drafted, the music galvanizes, and the dance
begins.

I like to see people do with their might whatsoever their hands or
their tongues or their feet find to do. A half-and-half performance of
the right is just about as mischievous as the perpetration of the
wrong. It is vacillation, hesitation, lack of will, feebleness of
purpose, imperfect execution, that works ill in all life. Be monarch
of all you survey. If a woman decides to do her own housework, let her
go in royally among her pots and kettles, and set everything a-stewing
and baking and broiling and boiling, as a queen might. If she decides
not to do housework, but to superintend its doing, let her say to her
servant, "Go," and he goeth, to another, "Come," and he cometh, to a
third, "Do this," and he doeth it, and not potter about. So, when
girls get themselves up and go to Saratoga for a regular campaign, let
their bearing be soldierly. Let them be gay with abandonment. Let
them take hold of it as if they liked it. I do not affect the word
flirtation, but the thing itself is not half so criminal as one would
think from the animadversions visited upon it. Of course, a deliberate
setting yourself to work to make some one fall in love with you, for
the mere purpose of showing your power, is abominable,--or would be, if
anybody ever did it; but I do not suppose it ever was done, except in
fifth-rate novels. What I mean is, that it is entertaining, harmless,
and beneficial for young people to amuse themselves with each other to
the top of their bent, if their bent is a natural and right one. A few
hearts may suffer accidental, transient injury; but hearts are like
limbs, all the stronger for being broken. Besides, where one man or
woman is injured by loving too much, nine hundred and ninety-nine die
the death from not loving enough. But these Saratoga girls did neither
one thing nor another. They dressed themselves in their best, making a
point of it, an