Fancy Frank deliberately proposing to go to a ball! How bitterly he smiles as he walks away from the course faster and faster, as thought after thought goads him to personal exertion! Now he despises himself thoroughly for his weakness in allowing the smile of a silly girl thus to sink into a strong man’s heart--now he analyses his own feelings as he would probe a corporeal wound, with a stern scientific pleasure in the examination--and anon he speculates vaguely on the arrangements of Nature, which provide us with sentimental follies for a _sauce piquante_ wherewith to flavour our daily bread. Nevertheless, our man of action is by no means satisfied with himself. He takes a fierce walk over the most unfrequented fields, and returns to his solitary lodgings, to read stiff chapters of old dogmatic writers, and to work out a tough equation or two, till he can “get this nonsense out of his head.” In vain, a fairy figure with long violet eyes and floating hair dances between him and his quarto, and the “unknown quantity” _plus_ Blanche continually eludes his mental grasp. We do not think Frank has enjoyed his day’s pleasure, any more than Mary Delaval. How few people do, could we but peep into their heart of hearts! Here are two at least of that gay throng in whom the shaft is rankling, and all this discomfort and anxiety exists because, forsooth, people never understand each other in time. We think it is in one of Rousseau’s novels that the catastrophe is continually being postponed because the heroine invariably becomes _vivement émue_, and unable to articulate, just at the critical moment when two words more would explain everything, and make her happy with her adorer. Were it not for this provoking weakness, she would be married and settled long before the end of the first volume: but then, to be sure, what would become of all the remaining pages of French sentimentality? If there were no uncertainty, there would be no romance--if we knew each other better, perhaps we should love each other less. Hopes and fears make up the game of life. Better be the germinating flower, blooming in the sunshine and cowering in the blast, than the withered branch, defiant indeed of winter’s cold and summer’s heat, but drinking in no dew of morning, putting forth no buds of spring, and in its dreary, barren isolation, unsusceptible of pleasure as of pain. CHAPTER VIII THE BALL THE COUNTRY BALL--A POETICAL PEER--BLANCHE’S PARTNERS--SMILES AND SCOWLS--MAMMA’S ADVICE--THE GENERAL’S POLITICS--THE MAJOR’S STRATEGY--“HOME”--THE DREAMER--THE SLEEPER--AND THE WATCHER