But of beauty Buenos Aires had enough and to spare. It is said (in Buenos Aires) that when Venus was apportioning her gifts among her sisters she gave pre-eminence in grace and elegance to the Spanish woman, in liveliness and savoir-faire to the Frenchwoman, to the Italian perfection of form and feature, to the Englishwoman a complexion clear as the morning, and so on, some special gift to the women of every race upon earth, but that she forgot the Porteña altogether, till being told of her neglect she took from each woman of every race a fragment of the special perfection of each one of them and bestowed it upon the Porteña, thus creating a race of women unequalled in the variety of their charms in any country under the sun. However that may be, it would be difficult to find anywhere such a collection of beauty as graced the saloons of Doña Josefina on this evening of the 5th July. Magdalen was not a Porteña, her friends called her the "Inglesita," because England had been her birthplace. She was short in stature, irregular in feature, with high cheek-bones; her English birth had not even endowed her with a brilliant complexion, but her figure was good, her hands and feet were small, and there was an easy grace about her every movement which was in itself no inconsiderable charm. Throughout this evening she was surrounded by a constant succession of admirers emulous of her hand, and each one as he led her to a seat after a dance lingered near her, wondering to himself what it was that made him so linger. She spoke little during the dances, for this was the first city ball at which she had ever been present; the brilliance of the scene somewhat embarrassed her, and many of those who sought an introduction to her she had never seen before. This was her first ball and she enjoyed it greatly, the pleasure which she felt beamed in her face; joy is infectious and produces joy in those who look upon it, by sympathy. Her dress was of white muslin, richly embroidered, with a very short body and immense balloon sleeves padded with swan's-down, which stood out round her shoulders but left the greater part of her arms bare. Under this dress she wore another of blue silk, the outer dress of muslin being looped up at the left side with a small rosette of blue silk; both dresses were exceedingly long in the skirt, sweeping the ground for fully a yard and a half behind her as she walked. Her hair, rising straight up from her forehead, was combed in a fashion much in vogue at that day into one mass on the top of her head, and was sparingly sprinkled with powder; from the back a few curls fell down behind her ears, and two or three smaller curls lay in careful negligence upon her forehead and temples. She wore a necklace of pearls, from the centre of which hung a small gold cross, and her left wrist was encircled by a bracelet of plain gold.