We go to the rooms in the evening, full dressed, and as fine as you please; and if you saw how the company rises to meet us, and the gracious manner we are received by all the first people, you 'd think we were sisters with half the room. For rank, wealth, and beauty, I never saw its equal; and the "tone," as Lord G. observes, is "so easy." Mary Anne usually dances all night, but _I_ only stand up for a quadrille, though Lord George torments me to polka with him. As for James, he never quits the roulette-table, which is a kind of game where you always win thirty-six times as much as you put down, though maybe occasionally you lose your stake, for it 's all chance, Molly, and, like everything else in this wicked world, in the hands of Fate! I 'm afraid James does n't understand the game, or forgets to take up his winnings; for when he joins us at supper, he looks depressed and careworn, till he has taken two or three glasses of champagne. Caroline, as you may suppose, stays moping at home. If there's anything distresses me more than another, it's the way that girl goes on. Here we are, in the very thick of the fashion, spending money,--as fast as hops,--ruining ourselves, I may say, with expense; and instead of taking the benefit of it while "it's going," she sits up in her room reading her eyes out of her head, and studying things that no woman need know. As I say to her, "What good is it to you? Will it ever get you a husband, to know that Sir Humphrey Clinker invented the safety-lamp? or do you suppose that any man will take a fancy to you for the sake of your chemistry and eccentricity? Besides," says I, "you could do all this at home, in Dodsborough, and who knows if we should n't be obliged to go back and finish our days in Ireland!" And in my heart and soul I believe it's what she 'd like! The real affliction in life is to see your children not take after you! That is the most dreadful calamity of all. You toil and you slave to bring them up with high notions, to teach them to look down upon whatever is low and mean, to avoid their poor relations, and whatever disgraces them, and you find, the whole time, 'tis looking back they are to their humble origin, and fancying that they were happier, for no other reason than because they were lower! It is, maybe, the McCarthy blood in me, but I feel as if the higher I went the lighter I grew; and so it is, I 'm sure, with Mary Anne. I know, from her face across the room, whether she's dancing with a "prince," or only "a gentleman from the United States"! And even in the matter of looks it makes the greatest difference in her. In the one case her eyes sparkle, her head is thrown back, her cheek glows with animation; while in the other she seems half asleep, dances out of time, and probably answers out of place.