The young lady smilingly agreed. The great example of Scully and Lady Gorgon was followed by all dancing men and women. Political enmities were forgotten. Whig voters invited Tory voters' wives to the dance. The daughters of Reform accepted the hands of the sons of Conservatism. The reconciliation of the Romans and Sabines was not more touching than this sweet fusion. Whack--whack! Springer clapped his hands; and the fiddlers adroitly obeying the cheerful signal, began playing “Sir Roger de Coverley” louder than ever. I do not know by what extraordinary charm (nescio qua praeter solitum, etc.), but young Perkins, who all his life had hated country-dances, was delighted with this one, and skipped and laughed, poussetting, crossing, down-the-middling, with his merry little partner, till every one of the bettermost sort of the thirty-nine couples had dropped panting away, and till the youngest Miss Gorgon, coming up to his partner, said in a loud hissing scornful whisper, “Lucy, Mamma thinks you have danced quite enough with this--this person.” And Lucy, blushing, starting back, and looking at Perkins in a very melancholy way, made him a little curtsey, and went off to the Gorgonian party with her cousin. Perkins was too frightened to lead her back to her place--too frightened at first, and then too angry. “Person!” said he: his soul swelled with a desperate republicanism: he went back to his patron more of a Radical than ever. He found that gentleman in the solitary tea-room, pacing up and down before the observant landlady and handmaidens of the “Gorgon Arms,” wiping his brows, gnawing his fingers--his ears looming over his stiff white shirt-collar as red as fire. Once more the great man seized John Perkins's hand as the latter came up. “D---- the aristocrats!” roared the ex-follower of Squaretoes. “And so say I! but what's the matter, sir?”