While yet a school-girl, during the Christmas holidays there was a great deal of juvenile dissipation in the way of balls, and so forth, the most delightful of all, in my opinion, being those given by Dr Everard at his celebrated establishment for young gentlemen, familiarly called the “Young House of Lords,” from the aristocracy of the pupils. My partners here were legion, including the late and the present Lords Northampton,[24] Mr Frederick Leveson Gower,[25] and my cousins, the sons of Sir Augustus Clifford. Willy Clifford, afterwards Admiral Sir William Clifford, caused great laughter among his school-fellows, who overheard him one night asking me to dance as follows: “Mary, will you have the honour of dancing with me?” Many men, I doubt not—if they spake their thoughts—might address a young lady in the same terms, but it is decidedly not the custom: which reminds me of a quaint reply I received once at a servants’ ball from a Somersetshire farmer, when in consideration of the difference of our social position I asked him to dance Sir Roger de Coverley with me. “Well, Miss Mary,” said honest Farmer Ashby, “I can’t say as I see any objection.” Footnote 24: Charles, third Marquess of Northampton, died in 1877. William, fourth Marquess, born in 1818, died in 1897. Footnote 25: Hon. Frederick Leveson Gower, second son of first Earl Granville. I need not enlarge here on the subject of Dr Everard’s school, for every reader of “Dombey and Son” must be intimately acquainted with the interior of that establishment, where, as is recorded in the delightful book just mentioned, the whole of the afternoon preceding the ball their house was pervaded by a strong smell of singed hair and curling-tongs. In those days, curly locks were considered an indispensable accessory to full dress. Yes, I did enjoy those merry dances at Dr Everard’s, and I was proud of my popularity among my school-boy friends; yet—and this belongs surely to confessions of which I ought to be ashamed—the eventful night came, still at Brighton, when I was to make my _début_, as a grown-up young lady, at a real grown-up ball. There was rapture in the idea, and yet, after the fashion of most earthly pleasures, there was a drawback. I never had any secrets from my mother, and to her I carried my fears and apprehensions.