She was seeing rather more than she had expected of her protégé. In Louisville there is a certain catholicity in the matter of big entertainments. That portion of the population which possesses the inborn or acquired right to call itself "Society" is not large enough to supply a sufficient number of dancing-men to sustain the true belle's boast that she never dances more than once around a ballroom with the same partner. Indeed, in the matter of belles themselves there is a certain catholicity. Every pretty girl who grows up in the old town with any pretentious to grammar and respectability and polite behavior has one chance in her lifetime to foot it with the best. She may, if she so wishes, enroll herself among the season's débutantes. If her family can afford a certain amount of entertaining to support this pretention, well and good. If not, she must manage as best she can with the friendly aid of the society column--no small power in the land. Let the would-be débutante but supply herself with presentable dancing frocks and slippers, and Louisville will do the rest.--For one season. During that brief time, however, she must make good her footing by means of matrimony or otherwise, or back to the chimney-corner for her, like Cinderella when the cock crew. The town is full of disappointed little Cinderellas, comforting themselves with good works or a humble domesticity, dreaming who knows what dreams of the Might-Have-Been. They do not all return to the chimney-corner, however. Sometimes they stay. Sometimes they fare forth joyously into a larger world, and their names lend luster to greater events than are chronicled in our society column. One, at least, trails gracefully through ducal halls, and the strawberry leaves are almost as becoming to her pretty hair as the rose she wore to her first Galt House ball.--Perhaps Louisville, with a reputation to sustain, is wise to give her unknown Cinderellas the benefit of the doubt. The male Cinderellas, if they are not welcomed with quite the same interest, are at least not as soon thrust back into the limbo of things forgotten. Once their names appear in the list of presentable dancers, they may arrive year after year at the larger balls, eat, drink and make merry, select such partners as please them, and retire into their lairs again until the next entertainment, with no further obligation on their part than perhaps a perfunctory handshaking with their host and hostess. Not even that, if modesty forbids. Nor need anything bar the gates to them except age, conspicuous behavior, or the lack of a long-tailed coat.