While the elder people talked about indifferent subjects upon which there could be no diversity of opinion, Louisa went up to the two young ladies, and shook hands with them, and the twins followed her example.--Now Mally and Sally were eighteen and nineteen years old, but they were not at all pretty, for Sally's complexion was of an unwholesome greenish gray colour, and Mally was her father's own child. They had--alas--quite finished their education, and had been at the Whitsun and Trinity balls in Rostock, so that their interests were of course far removed from those of the little girls, and as they were not particularly good-natured, they rather snubbed the children. And the little girls either not wishing it to be remarked, or thinking it was all right and proper, would not allow themselves to be repulsed by cold answers, and Louisa said to Mally with great eyes of admiration: "Oh, what a pretty dress you have on!"--All ladies however highly educated are pleased with remarks of this kind, so Mally thawed a little, and answered with a smile: "It is only an old gown, my new one cost thirty shillings more with the trimming and making."--"Papa gave us our new dresses for the Trinity ball. Oh, how we did dance to be sure!" added Sally.--Louisa knew the proper services for Trinity Sunday, but she had never in all her life heard of a Trinity ball, and besides that, she had no very clear idea of what a ball was, for although Mrs. Behrens had often spoken of what she had done in the days of her youth, and had also confessed to having been at a ball, still when Louisa asked what a ball was, she answered with all the dignity of a clergyman's wife, that it was "a very silly kind of amusement," and alluded to the subject no more.--Lina and Mina knew even less about it than she did. Their mother had of course danced now and then when she was a girl, but only at dances got up on the spur of the moment; and as for young Joseph, he had certainly been at a ball once, but then he had stopped at the door of the dancing-room, for he was so overwhelmed with shyness when he got there, that he beat a speedy retreat without venturing further; and uncle Bräsig had described it to them in a totally incomprehensible manner, as a number of white dresses with red and green ribbons, clarionets and flutes, waltzes and quadrilles, and a great many glasses of punch. When uncle Bräsig told them this, he used to show them, with his own short legs, the difference between a glissade and a hop, and that made them laugh heartily, and was great fun, but what it all had to do with a "ball," a ball such as their last governess had taken away from Mina, they could not comprehend.