"Ah," said Caroline, "I should have made Vargrave an excellent wife--pity he does not think so! As it is, I must set up for myself and become a _maitresse femme_. So you think I look well to-night? I am glad of it--Lord Doltimore is one who will be guided by what other people say." "You are not serious about Lord Doltimore?" "Most sadly serious." "Impossible! you could not speak so if you loved him." "Loved him! no! but I intend to marry him." Evelyn was revolted, but still incredulous. "And you, too, will marry one whom you do not love--'tis our fate--" "Never!" "We shall see." Evelyn's heart was damped, and her spirits fell. "Tell me now," said Caroline, pressing on the wrung withers, "do you not think this excitement, partial and provincial though it be--the sense of beauty, the hope of conquest, the consciousness of power--better than the dull monotony of the Devonshire cottage? Be honest--" "No, no, indeed!" answered Evelyn, tearfully and passionately; "one hour with my mother, one smile from her lips, were worth it all." "And in your visions of marriage, you think then of nothing but roses and doves,--love in a cottage!" "Love _in a home_, no matter whether a palace or a cottage," returned Evelyn. "Home!" repeated Caroline, bitterly; "home,--home is the English synonym for the French _ennui_. But I hear Papa on the stairs." A ballroom--what a scene of commonplace! how hackneyed in novels! how trite in ordinary life! and yet ballrooms have a character and a sentiment of their own, for all tempers and all ages. Something in the lights, the crowd, the music, conduces to stir up many of the thoughts that belong to fancy and romance. It is a melancholy scene to men after a certain age. It revives many of those lighter and more graceful images connected with the wandering desires of youth,--shadows that crossed us, and seemed love, but were not; having much of the grace and charm, but none of the passion and the tragedy, of love. So many of our earliest and gentlest recollections are connected with those chalked floors, and that music painfully gay, and those quiet nooks and corners, where the talk that hovers about the heart and does not touch it has been held. Apart and unsympathizing in that austerer wisdom which comes to us after deep passions have been excited, we see form after form chasing the butterflies that dazzle us no longer among the flowers that have evermore lost their fragrance. Somehow or other, it is one of the scenes that remind us most forcibly of the loss of youth! We are brought so closely in contact with the young and with the short-lived pleasures that once pleased us, and have forfeited all bloom. Happy the man who turns from "the tinkling cymbal" and "the gallery of pictures," and can think of some watchful eye and some kind heart _at home_; but those who have no home--and they are a numerous tribe--never feel lonelier hermits or sadder moralists than in such a crowd.