refiguring the era of clubs. Alice and
Ph[oe]be Cary's receptions had grown to be quite the rage; and Anne C.
Lynch was another figure in the social-literary world. Beecher was
drawing large audiences in Brooklyn, and telling the old truths in a new
fashion. There is always a great seething and tumult before the water
fairly boils and precipitates the dregs to the bottom.

But whatever comes and goes, young girls are always growing up with the
flush and fragrance and elusive fascinations of spring. To-day, a
credulous tenderness and overwhelming faith in the past; to-morrow, a
little doubtful, hesitatingly anticipative, with the watchwords of "The
True, the Good, and the Beautiful;" and still concerned in the latest
style of doing one's back hair, and if silver combs and gilt pins would
keep in fashion; and flushing celestial rosy red, yet with an odd sense
of importance, when men began to lift their hats in a gravely polite
manner, as if the laughing, hoydenish girl of yesterday, who strung
herself out four or five wide on the sidewalk with books in hand, was
the shy, refined, hesitating, utterly delicious young woman of to-day.

There were times when Hanny stood on the mysterious borderland. She used
to steal up and look at the wraith of a ball-dress hanging in the
third-floor closet, put away with the "choice" garments. The skirt
looked so long, almost uncanny. She could see the girl who had gone to
the banquet, who had danced with young men who asked "the pleasure" with
the politest inclination of the head. And, oh, the lovely dances she had
with Mr. Andersen! The bewitching Spanish movement floated through her
brain; and the young man's voice--what a curious, lingering sweetness it
had--went over her like a wave of music. Of course his German cousin
would fall in love with him,--how could she help it?--and they would
marry. They would go to Paris once a year or so, when business took him;
they would go over to London; but their real home would be in some
German town, or maybe in the castle from which the pretty grandmother
had run away with her American lover. She was so glad there were real
romances left in the world. It wasn't likely any would happen to her.
She was not tall, nor elegant, nor handsome; and though she could sing
"Bonnie Doon," "Annie Laurie," "A Rose-tree in Full Bearing," and "The
Girl I Left behind me," for her father, she was not a company singer.
But she really didn't mind. Her father would wa