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as goaded to fury. "Why, you impudent, brazen-faced Drury Lane trull! A month at Bridewell would do you good, you----" Her ladyship's vocabulary of abuse was pretty extensive but it was cut short. A dice box with the ivories inside flew across the table hurled with the full strength of a vigorous shapely arm. This was Sally Salisbury's retort. A corner of a dice cut the lady's lip and a drop of blood trickled on to her chin. Beyond herself with rage, Lady Anastasia seized a wine glass--a somewhat dangerous projectile, for the wine glasses of the time were large and thick and heavy--and would have dashed it at her antagonist but one of the players, a man, grasped her wrist and held it. "Let her ladyship have her chance. She's entitled to it. A duel at a masquerade between two women of fashion! Why, it'll be the talk of the town for a whole week," and Sally Salisbury laughed derisively. But so vulgar a _fracas_ was not to the taste of Lady Anastasia's friends, besides which the attendants were alarmed and ran to prevent further disturbance. They abstained, however, from interfering with Sally Salisbury. Her ungovernable temper and her fear of nothing were well known. If she once let herself go there was no telling where she would stop. At this moment, however, her temper was under perfect control and indeed she was rather enjoying herself. She rose, pushed away her chair with a backward kick to give room for her ample hoops, and curtseying low to the company marched out of the room without so much as a glance at her rival who was on the verge of hysterics. Mistress Salisbury entered the ball-room, now tenanted by the dregs of the company most of them more or less stupefied or excited, according to their temperaments, by drink. In one corner was a young man whose richly embroidered silk coat of a pale lavender was streaked with wine, whose ruffles were torn and whose wig was awry. To him was talking in a thick growling bass a man arrayed in a costume hardly befitting a ball-room, unless indeed he wore it as a fancy dress. But his evil face, dark, dirty, and inflamed by deep potations, the line of an old scar extending from the corner of his mouth almost to his ear showing white against the purple of his bloated cheek forbade this supposition. Captain Jeremy Rofflash in point of fact was very drunk. He had for the last three or four hours been industriously engaged in getting rid of some of the guineas of t
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