When the question was duly explained to her, she answered languidly, "I don't know. Do you think I'd better?" "I might as well make a clean breast of it, first as last," said Hoskins. "I thought perhaps Mrs. Elmore might refuse, she's so stiff about some things,"--here he gave that chuckle of his,--"and so I came prepared for contingencies. It occurred to me that it mightn't be quite the thing, and so I went round to the Spanish consul and asked him how he thought it would do for me to matronize a young lady if I could get one, and he said he didn't think it would do at all." Hoskins let this adverse decision sink into the breasts of his listeners before he added: "But he said that he was going with his wife, and that if we would come along she could matronize us both. I don't know how it would work," he concluded impartially. They all looked at Elmore, who stood holding the princess's missive in his hand, and darkly forecasting the chances of consent and denial. At the first suggestion of the matter, a reckless hope that this ball might bring Ehrhardt above their horizon again sprang up in his heart, and became a desperate fear when the whole responsibility of action was, as usual, left with him. He stood, feeling that Hoskins had used him very ill. "I suppose," began Mrs. Elmore very thoughtfully, "that this will be something quite in the style of the old masquerades under the Republic." "Regular Ridotto business, the Spanish consul says," answered Hoskins. "It might be very useful to you, Owen," she resumed, "in an historical way, if Lily were to go and take notes of everything; so that when you came to that period you could describe its corruptions intelligently." Elmore laughed. "I never thought of that, my dear," he said, returning the invitation to Hoskins. "Your historical sense has been awakened late, but it promises to be very active. Lily had better go, by all means, and I shall depend upon her coming home with very full notes upon her dance-list." They laughed at the professor's sarcasm, and Hoskins, having undertaken to see that the last claims of etiquette were satisfied by getting an invitation sent to Miss Mayhew through the Spanish consul, went off, and left the ladies to the discussion of ways and means. Mrs. Elmore said that of course it was now too late to hope to get anything done, and then set herself to devise the character that Lily would have appeared in if there had been time to get her ready, or if all the work-people had not been so busy that it was merely frantic to think of anything. She first patriotically considered her as Columbia, with the customary drapery of stars and stripes and the cap of liberty. But while holding that she would have looked very pretty in the dress, Mrs. Elmore decided that it would have been too hackneyed; and besides, everybody would have known instantly who it was. "Why not have had her go in the character of Mr. Hoskins's 'Westward'?" suggested Elmore, with lazy irony.