50 Queen's Gate, to the effect that he has much pleasure in accepting
Mrs. Smythe's kind invitation. He feels quite safe. Lady Fitzbattleaxe
and her set, all of whom he knows, will be there; and she wouldn't have
sent the card unless she had reason to know that the thing was going to
be well done. Unattached bachelors who dance have, in fact, little
difficulty in getting their fill of dancing in the season if they lay
themselves out for doing so. A young lady can't, as a rule, be asked
without at the same time sending a card to her mother or other chaperon,
whom the hostess may, from considerations of space or otherwise, not
want to have; whereas your dancing-man takes up very little room, brings
no one but himself, shifts for himself, and is indeed more or less
positively useful toward promoting the avowed object of the gathering.
Aware of this, it is a not uncommon practice with dance-going bachelors
to interrogate a partner whom they feel a wish to meet again as to the
_locales_ of her coming dance-engagements, and thereupon, through the
medium of some friend of that potent and wonderful class, the
Know-everybodys, to manage somehow to procure for themselves cards of
invitation to the houses and parties indicated, whosoever and wherever
they may be.

But now, supposing Lady This or Mrs. That to have made up her mind to
give a ball, where will she give it? At home, no doubt, in the great
majority of cases; but if her rooms happen to be small, or she wishes to
avoid the nuisance of having her own house turned upside down (as it
must be for a couple of days at the least if a ball is to be held in
it), she may prefer--I am assuming expense to be no object--to hire some
public rooms, like Willis's, or an empty house for the occasion; of
which alternatives it is ten to one that the latter will be adopted.
True it is that the ball-room at Willis's (in old days so well known as
Almack's), though far too narrow for its length, offers a floor of
superlative smoothness, and that its position, in the very heart of the
St. James's quarter, leaves nothing to be desired; but the place is so
generally associated with festivities of the public and semi-public
classes that anybody giving a private dance there may feel sure that the
guests will not regard it as quite the same sort of thing as a dance in
a private house. The empty-house plan is not open to this objection.
Owing its origin, doubtless, to the prodigious amount of house-bui