Picnics being well known by all the fair and brave, who deserve each other, as so charming and offering such charming opportunities for attaining their deserts, there is no wonder that everyone was delighted with Mrs. Wilkes’s scheme. Miss Millicent, as the heroine of the occasion, gave deep thought to her toilet. She was resolved to be captivating as Miss Millicent, that is for herself; not as Miss Center, that is for her fortune. She had always adorers enough, besides the inevitable Dulger, but he was her thrall and the others she had flirted through. She had been observed to be dissatisfied of late. Was it that she had failed with Sir Comeguys? Or did some other novelty refuse to enter her toils? Or was there some escaped one whom she wished to beguile back again with penitential wiles? Or was she a little ashamed of her exacting, not immoral, _cicisbeism_ with poor Billy? For whatever reason, Miss Milly seemed a little disappointed, and Mrs. Wilkes, not thinking it proper that any of her protégées should be out of spirits, hoped well of the picnic, that it would restore the heiress to amiability. So Mrs. Wilkes shopped extravagantly with Miss Milly and the girls. Clara and Diana were of course to be of the party. They were really the belles. The men who fell in love with Diana that summer, and some of them were stanch old belle-ringers, say that she was the culmination; that there never was and never will be another like her. And then, some stanchest old member of the pack gives tongue and says “Except Clara,” and the whole pack cry “Except Clara”--Clara not second in order, but only subsequent in thought. Everybody, in a word, was to be at the picnic. Everybody means thirty or forty people. Good Mrs. Wilkes had a moment’s hesitation about Mrs. Budlong, and privately consulted Peter Skerrett, her Grand Vizier. Peter, with his usual thoughtfulness, pointed out that Miss Arabella couldn’t go without her mother; so Mrs. B. was invited. Mrs. Aquiline, _née_ Retroussée, had recently begun a dead set at Mr. Waddy. She engaged ardently in the project. There would be a band and a boatload of champagne and a sail home by moonlight. In short, Miss Milly Center’s birthday picnic was to be the event of the season. Her spirits rose as she beheld her most becoming dress, and she prognosticated for herself no solemn epoch of repentance and reform, but an auroral dawn of new flirtations with full recovery of all the old, an _annus mirabilis_ of social success and scores of manly hearts trampled under foot. CHAPTER XIX MISS CENTER’S BIRTHDAY PARTY AND WHAT OCCURRED THEREAT