Events of the Night Life at Weet-sur-Mer, as at most other places of its class, swung in a round prescribed by custom, as fixed and predestined as the courses of the stars. In the late morning occurred the promenade, taken as a brisk constitutional by a few, but by the great majority as a languid stroll designed to create an appetite for luncheon. That meal was followed by a period of torpor, then every one sought the beach--the high, the low; the rich, the poor; the dowdy and the well-dressed; the virgin in white and the cocotte in scarlet; the thin and the obese; the French, the Dutch, the Italian--yea, and the angular English, for Weet-sur-Mer attracted a crowd as hybrid as its name! There they amused themselves each after his own fashion, with dignity or abandon, as the case might be. They could not be said to mingle in the way that an American crowd would have done under like circumstances--the elements of society in an aristocratic country are as incapable of mingling as oil and water. The oil floated placidly on top, while the water disported itself contentedly beneath. The oil, to preserve the simile, consisted, in the first place, of a number of self-important individuals stalking solemnly up and down, seemingly unconscious of the fact that they were not as solitary as Crusoe; and, in the second place, of certain solid, cohesive groups, presenting to the world a front as impenetrable and threatening as any Austrian phalanx, and guarding in their midst two or three young girls who must, at any hazard, be kept unspotted from the world. Strange to say, the girls appeared contented, even happy; the position seemed to them, no doubt, the normal one for them to occupy--and they could, of course, look forward with certainty to the opening of the prison door when a marriage should be arranged for them. They order this matter better in Europe; or, at least, differently, for there, as a discerning observer has pointed out, marriage means always that a woman is taken down from the shelf, while with us, alas, too often! that she is placed upon it, never to be removed!