"Perhaps it is," he agreed. "Well, now, Maurice will be Theophile Gautier--no, he won't--the red waistcoat knocks him out--Edmond de Goncourt? No, he had a mustache. Chopin? Long hair. Look here, I don't think we'll be anybody in particular. We'll just be ladies and gentlemen of the period. You know you girls have got to wear crinolines and fichus and corkscrew curls." "Like we used to wear in Boheme in the Opera?" "That's it. You must see about your dresses at once. Good ones will cost about ten pounds to hire, and that ought to include some decent paste." "We sha'n't have to pay for _our_ tickets." "Good. Four guineas saved. Dresses? Say twenty pounds for the eight of us. Supper with fizz another ten quid. Four salmon-colored taxis with tips, ten pounds." "How much?" Jenny exclaimed. "Ten pounds just to take us to Covent Garden Ball and back?" "Ah, but I've a plan. These salmon-colored taxis are going to be the _chef d'oeuvre_ as well as the _hors d'oeuvre_ of the entertainment. Hush, it's a secret. Let me see, our tickets--four guineas--forty-four pounds four shillings. Well, say fifty quid to include all tips and breakfast." "Well, I think it's too much," Jenny declared. "Not too much for an evening that shall be famous over all evenings--an evening that you, my Jenny, will remember when you're an ancient old woman--an evening that we'll talk over for the rest of our lives." While Maurice was speaking, the shadow of a gigantic doubt passed over Jenny's mind. She endured one of those moments when only the profound uselessness of everything has any power to impress the reason. She suffered a complete loss of faith and hope. The moment was one of those black abysses before which the mind is aghast at effort and conceives annihilation. In the Middle Ages such an experience would have been ascribed to the direct and personal influence of Satan. "What's the matter?" Maurice asked. "You look as if you didn't believe me." But, while the question was still on his lips, the shadow passed, and Jenny laughed. The famous evening was finally assigned to the twenty-seventh of January. The four girls took their places in the ballet as usual and, meeting from time to time in evolutions, would murmur as they danced by, "To-night, what, what?" or "Don't you wish it was eleven?" They would look at each other, too, from opposite sides of the stage, smiling in the sympathy of anticipated pleasure. When the curtains fell they hurried to their dressing-rooms to exchange tights and spangles for mid-Victorian frocks, whose dainty lace made all the other girls very envious indeed. Some were so envious as to suggest to Jenny that another color would have suited her better than pink or that her hair would be more becoming _en chignon_ than curled. But Jenny was not deceived by such professions of amiable advice.