"I begged to decline the proposal concerning the wild Irish girl and the Irish harp, but agreed to carry a basket of flowers. Certainly the _fête_-givers worked 'with a will,' turned the great house 'out of windows,' converting the two school-rooms, big and little, into a ball-room, and decorating it richly with green leaves and roses, real and artificial. I congratulated them on the prospect. 'Yes,' said Miss Landon, 'the mechanical getting-up is all very well; I wish all that is termed "dashing" did not lie in the tomb of the Duchess of Gordon. A quadrille is but still life put into motion. Our faces, like our summers, want sunshine. Old Froissart complained in his day, that the English, after their fashion, "_s'amusent moult tristement_." A ball-room is merely "Arithmetic and the use of figures taught here." A young lady in a quadrille might answer,--"I am too busy to laugh,--I am making my calculations." And yet ours is not a marrying age; the men have discovered that servants and wives are _so_ expensive,--still a young lady's delight in a ball, if not _raisonnable_, has always--_quelque raison!_ and I am determined, if I die in the cause, that ours shall be a success!' Her conversation was always epigrammatic. "It seems absurd that a ball should be the first great event of my literary life. There I saw for the first time many persons who became in after-years intimate friends, and whose names are now parts of the history of the literature of their country. 'Mr.' Edward Bulwer, then on the threshold of fame, 'came out' in military uniform. L. E. L. assured me he was very clever, had written a novel, and 'piles of poetry,' and would be wonderful soon, but that he was much too handsome for an author; at which opinion, little Miss Spence, in a plum-pudding sort of turban, with a bird-of-paradise bobbing over the front, and a fan even larger than poor Lady Morgan's, agitated her sultana's dress, and assured me that 'nothing elevated the expression of beauty so much as literature,' and that 'young things, like many of the present company, would not look as well in ten years!' Mr. Bulwer was certainly pronounced by the ladies the handsomest youth in the room. The gentlemen endeavored to put him down as 'effeminate,' but all in vain. They called him 'a fair, delicate, very, _very_ young man,'--'a boy,' in fact. I remember wondering at the searching expression of his large, wandering, bluish eyes, that seemed looking in and out at everybody and at everything. The lady of his love was there, and she ought to have been dressed as the Sultana poor Miss Spence burlesqued. Nature had bestowed on her an Oriental style of beauty, and she would have come out well in Oriental costume; but she chose the dress of a Swiss peasant, which, being more juvenile, brought her nearer to her lover's age. She certainly was radiantly beautiful. She had a mouth like 'chiselled coral,' and eyes fierce as an eagle's or tender as a dove's, as passion moved her.