But to return to our ball: by this time so fair a proportion of the company had arrived, that it was thought advisable to commence dancing. For this purpose Mr. Salter, with a feeling of exultation which made him forget, for the time, what the whole entertainment was likely to cost, led Lady Flamborough to the head of the room. Her ladyship had evidently been pretty in her youth; but though the remains of a fine woman may sometimes be viewed with a blending of admiration with our veneration, mere prettiness seldom grows old gracefully. In Lady Flamborough's case it certainly did not. Her once nicely rounded little figure had now outgrown all bounds, not excepting those of the drapery which ought to have concealed its exuberance. Her once infantine features were now nearly lost in the midst of a countenance disproportionally increased in its general dimensions; while in manner she still played off numberless once becoming, but now disgusting, airs of artless innocence; languishing, lisping, and rolling her eyes; and childishly twisting her fingers through the ringlets of her hair, while looking up in her partner's face, and saying silly things. Had it been possible to have checked coquetry in Lady Flamborough, the sight of the senseless bloated countenance on which she was thus casting away those interesting appeals of her visual orbs, one would have thought might have done so. Mr. Salter's head was in shape something like a sugar loaf: the region denominated fore-head, and appropriated by phrenologists to the intellectual faculties, being so confined, that it nearly came to a point, while the descent widened as it approached the organs of gustativeness, and all that called itself face, concluded without any distinct line of demarcation, in a jole, much resembling that of a cod-fish. The eyes were colourless, and owed all the brilliancy they possessed to an inflammation of the lids, which never forsook them. The efforts of their owner, on the present occasion, to give them a languishing roll, that should correspond with that of her ladyship's, was truly ludicrous. As to his mouth, it bisected his countenance from ear to ear, which rendered his endeavours to spread it wider by that bland movement designated a smile, nearly abortive. A few additional lines of circular or spherical trigonometry were conspicuously marked upon cheeks that yielded in carnation hue to nought save the nose; while this rallying point of the vital powers, like certain well-known altars of the ancients, never allowed the flame to go out.