But Mrs. Gower’s company is dull to-night; we may leave the ball with her, but we will not go. Her eyes are jaded with such sights; let us escort some brighter ones, and gayer spirits, and hearts more fresh to all impression. Such an one was Mamie’s; and prettily encased it was, in her glove-like waist that seemed without a wrinkle and made of whitest kid, over which her shoulders peeped more snowy, and from which streamed a frothy train of rippling--illusion, do they call it? Gracie had been down some time, with the old people, when she rippled like the springtime, down the stairs, with her arch eyes dancing and her cheeks encarnadine. Gracie’s beauty, to be sure, was greater still; only somehow, you did not look at it at first; it was but part of her, like the sky of some fair country. Mr. and Mrs. Livingstone looked down on Mamie, though, with the happy pride of being parents to such a poem; they were much too old to go to balls, and so some married cousin had been found to matronize them. Miss Brevier alone noted Mamie’s heightened color and evident excitement; but thought it due to her first ball alone; and the old people kissed her and complimented her, and gave her obsolete advice, and sent her off so proudly--to the choice, as some might say, of two adventurers. Gracie and Mamie came down and took their first timid look at the ball from a sort of anteroom, that was one of the ball-rooms and was yet so near the dressing-room as to grant a hesitating woman _locus pænitentiæ_, and not commit her finally to the floor. That first glance at the ball-room; tell me whom you see in it, and whom you don’t see, and I can tell you, gipsy-like, much of those bodies whose orbits bode entanglement to yours. Thus it chanced that Gracie saw Haviland and Arthur; and both saw Mrs. Gower; and Mamie noted that she did not see either Charlie Townley or Mr. Derwent. I fancy that none of our three heroines will tell us much about the party, to-night--at least, we shall learn rather what people said than how they looked and what they wore--but I may tell the reader confidentially that were it not for this, we had not come. For may he not read, in to-morrow’s papers, all about the flowers, and the servants, and the music, and the wines--aye, and the people who came, and how they looked, and all that may be known about the women’s dresses? Both fell to indifferent cavaliers, at first; that is, Mamie to John Haviland, with whom she had no sympathy, and Gracie to Mr. Kill Van Kull, who, being a gentleman, though a wicked one, had the grace most reverently to like her.