ws
a disposition to smile in his direction.

I have done Mr. Parker an injustice in accrediting him with any
_mauvaise honte_. On the contrary, he clearly glories in his shame.

"Not half so bad, after all, are they?" he says in a voice of loud and
cheerful appeal to me, as he comes up. "I mean considering, of course,
that they were not _meant_ for one, they really do very decently, do not
they?"

I have put up my fan to hide the irresistible contortions which lips and
mouth are undergoing.

"Very!" I say, indistinctly.

Almost everybody has stopped dancing, and is staring with unaffected
wonder at them. Their heads are heavily floured, and their cheeks
rouged. They have also greatly overdone the burnt hair-pin, as a huge
smouch of black under each of their eyes attests.

They have all three got painfully tight knee-breeches, white stockings,
and enormously long, broad-skirted coats, embroidered in tarnished gold.
Algy's is plum-color. The arms of all three are very, _very_ tight. Had
our ancestors indeed such skinny limbs, and such prodigious backs?

Algy is a tall young man, but the waist of his coat is somewhere about
the calves of his legs. It has told upon his spirits; he looks
supernaturally grave.

Mr. Parker is differently visited. He has an apparently unaccountable
reluctance to turning his back to me. I put it down at first to an
exaggerated politeness; but, when, at last, in walking away, he
unavoidably does it, I no longer wonder at his unwillingness, as his
coat-tails decline to meet within half a mile. His forefathers must have
been oddly framed.

"_Poor fellows!_" says my partner, in a tone of the profoundest
compassion, as he puts his arm round me, and prepares to whirl me again
into the throng, "_how_ I pity them! What on earth did they do it for?"

"Oh, I do not know," I reply; "for _fun_ I suppose!"

But I think that except in the case of Mr. Parker, who really enjoys
himself, and goes about making jovial jests at his own expense, and
asking everybody whether he is not immensely improved by the loss of his
red hair, that there is not much fun in it.

Algy is as sulky and shamefaced as a dog with a tin kettle tied to his
tail, and Mr. Musgrave has altogether disappeared.

The evening wears on. I forget my cheeks, and dance every thing. _How_ I
_am_ enjoying myself! Man after man is brought up to me, and they all
seem pleased with me. At many of the things I say, they laugh heartily,
an