There was a dance in the evening at the hotel. Lulu was to dance with me, of course, the first set, and as many waltzes as I chose. She was so sparkling, so evidently happy, that I observed the New York belles, to whom happiness is an inexplicable word, scanned her with an air of lofty wonder and elegant disdain. But Lulu was so genuinely graceful and charming; she remained so quietly superior in her simplicity to the assuming _hauteur_ of the metropolitan misses, that I kept myself in perfect good-humor, and did not feel myself at all humbled in the eyes of the Young America of that city, because I was the cavalier of the unique Southerner. So far did this go, that in my desire to revenge myself upon the New Yorkers, I resolved to increase their chagrin by praising Lulu to the chief belle of the set. To her I was introduced. A New York belle at a Watering-Place! "There's a divinity doth hedge her," and a mystery too. She looked at me with supreme indifference as I advanced to the ordeal of presentation, evidently measuring my claims upon her consideration by the general aspect of my outer man. I moved with a certain pride, because although I felt awkward before the glance of Lulu, I was entirely self-possessed in the consciousness of unexceptionable attire before the unmeaning stare of the fashionable _parvenue_. You see I do get a little warm in speaking of her, and yet I was as cool as an autumn morning, when I made my bow, and requested her hand for the next set. We danced _vis-a-vis_ to Lulu. My partner swung her head around upon her neck, as none but Juno or Minerva should venture to do, and looked at the other _personal_ of the quadrille, to see if she were in a perfectly safe set. I ventured a brief remark upon nothing--the weather, probably. The Queen of the Cannibal Islands bent majestically in a monosyllabic response. "It is very warm to-night," continued I. "Yes, very warm," she responded. "You have been long here?" "Two weeks." "Probably you came from Niagara?" "No, from Sharon." "Shall you go to Lake George?" "No, we go to Newport." There I paused, and fondled my handkerchief, while the impassible lady relapsed into her magnificent silence, and offered no hope of any conversation in any direction. But I would not be balked of my object, and determined that if the living stream did run "quick below," the glaring polish of ice which these "fine manners" presented, my remark should be an Artesian bore to it. "How handsome our _vis-a-vis_ is?" said I. My stately lady said nothing, but tossed her head slightly, without changing her expression, except to make it more pointedly frigid, in a reply which was a most vociferous negative, petrified by politeness into ungracious assent. "She is what Lucia of Lammermoor might have been before she was unhappy," continued I, plunging directly off into the sea of trouble. "Ah! I don't know Miss Lammermoor," responded my partner, with _sang-froid_.