ou have been at
small social parties and crowded balls: they must have given you
sufficient experience to understand the remarks I make.

Have you not, then, felt at the quiet parties of which I have spoken (as
contrasted with dissipated ones) that it was pleasure enough for you to
spend your whole evening talking with persons of your own sex and age
over the simple occupations oL your daily-life, or the studies which
engage the interest of your already cultivated mind? Lady L. may have
collected a circle of admirers around her, and Miss M.'s music may have
been extolled as worthy of an artist, but upon all this you looked
merely as a spectator; without either wish or idea of sharing in their
publicity or their renown, you probably did not form a thought,
certainly not a wish, of the kind. In the ball-room, however, the case
is altogether different; the most simple and fresh-minded woman cannot
escape from feelings of pain or regret at being neglected or unobserved
here. She goes for the professed purpose of dancing; and when few or no
opportunities are afforded her of sharing in that which is the amusement
of the rest of the room, should she feel neither mortification at her
own position, nor envy, however disguised and modified, at the different
position of others, she can possess none of that sensitiveness which is
your distinctive quality. It is true, indeed, that the experienced
chaperon is well aware that the girl who commands the greatest number of
partners is not the one most likely to have the greatest number of
proposals-at the end of the season, nor the one who will finally make
the most successful _parti_. This reconciles the prudential looker-on to
the occasional and partial appearance of neglect. Not so the young and
inexperienced aspirant to admiration: _her_ worldliness is now in an
earlier phase; and she thinks that her fame rises or falls among her
companions according as she can compete with them in the number of her
partners, or their exclusive devotion to her, which after a season or
two is discovered to be a still safer test of successful coquetry. Thus
may the young innocent heart be gradually led on to depend for its
enjoyment on the factitious passing admiration of a light and
thoughtless hour; and still worse, if possessed of keen susceptibilities
and powers of quick adaptation, the lesson is often too easily learned
of practising the arts likely to attract notice, thus losing for ever
the simp