Themselves and their male relatives seemed indeed to have been aware of this,--to have known that there was another and more appropriate arena for the displaying of them to advantage; and, though it had not been set forth in the gazette, I could have discovered, from the looks of speculation that were quietly exchanged in the proximity, and even in the presence of majesty, that there would be a chapter of the Highland fling. Those tender telegraphings were as new to me as any part of the proceedings; and they led me to observe the unique and characteristic nature of a modern Athenian ogle. The Athenian damsels, or dames, as it happens, cannot have so many of the soft propensities of the flesh as their more plump neighbours of the south, not having so much flesh wherein the same may be contained; but, from all that I could discover, they have not, upon the whole, less of the _mater amoris_ in them; and being a more firm and substantial matter--more “bred in the bones” as it were, it is perchance more deep and more durable. Thus, while the dimple of an English cheek tells its soft tale of love, the jutting angle of an Athenian cheek-bone hints at the same; and there is often more amatory demonstration in a single Caledonian wrinkle, than in all the blushes of the most blooming dame southward of the Tweed. The extreme vigilance, too, with which the ladies of the Athens watch each other, and especially the cat-like lurkings which the plain and decaying have for those who have more of the species and are more in the season of bloom, gives a wariness to the character of every woman within that metropolis, and makes even the most accredited and creditable love an affair of mystery and intrigue. If a gentleman is detected walking with or speaking civilly to one lady, eyes, from loop-holes of which he dreams not, are instantly upon him, and the affair is handed about from coterie to coterie, as a marriage, or as something worse; while, if he is seen with two or more, he is a Don Juan of the first magnitude, and they, “poor dear lost things, are--very much to be pitied indeed.” So far as I know, they have no tendency to pity themselves in such cases; but this may be the very reason why they have so much of it to spare to their neighbours. This propensity could not be restrained even by the counter-excitation of the royal presence; and while everybody upon whom the King was pleased to smile at the shows (and he was graciously pleased to smile upon a great number) was _pitied_, or, as it might have been, _envied_, as the object of regal flirtation, those blowsy country sisters and cousins, whom awkward accountants and spruce scribes kept lumbering along the streets upon the resting days, were, in the bitterness of the Athenian anguish, set down as spouses soon to be.