When newspapers describe all this, they speak a little of the ladies’ dresses--but chiefly of the horses. For this fashionable life of ours, the life of so many of those with whom our lines have, thus far, been cast, seems founded, in its last analysis, upon the horse alone. That noble animal, in all his varied uses, under the saddle, in a four-in-hand, at Mrs. Gower’s carriage traces--take him all-in-all, he stands for everything; he is almost the protagonist of Flossie Gower’s little play. Sculptors, historians, students of social science, would, in ages yet to come, I am sure, term this the age of the Horse; they would, I say, if Mrs. Gower and her set shall even leave a wrack behind. But the wracks they leave behind are, alas! too often not their own. And to others, perhaps, to Jem Starbuck and the workers in the Allegheny country, as well as to the future historian, this age may rather seem the age of Coal. So Mamie Livingstone went to the show, and the show was very fine indeed. First there was a pack of fox-hounds--real fox-hounds--and then there was a pack of beagles, sixteen or more, with little curly tails; and the gentlemen and ladies rode some miles behind them, on a scented track, and jumped several fences. And Charlie looked very smart in his pink coat, and took the leaps most daringly; and thereupon Mamie did admire him very much, and therefore begin to think seriously of him for a husband. And the dinner was exquisitely cooked, and quite bright and gay; and the men had all red coats and the women all white throats; and when the ladies left the table the fun was even faster. For when the stories were all told, and they could not talk of the ladies, both because many of the husbands were there and because the subject was a bore at best--and the best of it is surely tête-à-tête--and when even horses had been talked about enough, they went into the ball-room, did these merry dogs, and danced with these fine ladies; only some of them chose to walk in the lawns and over the turf steeple-chase course, where there was shrubbery, and hurdles, and much helping over of carefully preserved stone wails. Have you had a good time, reader? Here we have been a hundred miles on the outside of a coach, and quite three weeks in the open air, and, I am sure, have had dinners and balls galore. Take your last deep breath of all these joys, for all even of our lines, may not fall in such pleasant places. What--we shall not say we are tired of it--we who have been with the fortunate few? Why, who can make more, who could make more, of life than they? Is it not a pleasant play? Well, a secret, then: Van Kull and Wemyss too, are bored, and even Tony Duval finds it slow. For Flossie Gower I speak not; she has a great, still fed, self-pride, and when that, too, grows stale--she is too clever to let it bore her--she will leave it first; and Birmingham is saved by his British atmosphere and healthy, dormant brain.