With the new year came the dance, which we bachelor members of the club gave to the English ladies in particular and to Manila society in general, as a small return for hospitality received, and it was declared a huge success. The club-house was decorated from top to toe. Two or three hundred invitations were sent out, and the crême de la crême of the European population were on hand, including General Blanco, the governor of the islands. The English club rarely gives a dance more than once in five years, and when the engraved invitations first appeared there was much talk and hobnobbing among the Spaniards to see who had and who had not been invited. All the greedy Dons who had ever met any of the clubmen expected to be asked, and considered it an insult not to receive an invitation. One high official, who had himself been invited, wrote to the committee seeking an invitation for some friends. As, of course, only a limited number could be accommodated at the club-house, the invitations were strictly limited, and a reply was sent to the Spanish gentleman in question, stating that there were no more invitations to be had. "Do you mean to insult me and my friends?" he wrote, "by saying that there are no more invitations left for them? Do you mean to say that my friends are not gentlemen, and so you won't ask them? I must insist on an explanation, or satisfaction." For several days before the party one might have heard young women and girls who walked up and down the Luneta talking nothing but dance, and the Spanish society seemed to be divided up into two distinct cliques, the chosen and the uninvited. The chosen proceeded at once to starve themselves and use what superfluous dollars they could collect in buying new gowns at the large Parisian shops on the Escolta. Most of the Spanish women in Manila can well afford to be abstemious and devote the surplus thus obtained to the ornamentation of their persons, since they are so fairly stout that the fires of their appetite can be kept going some time after actual daily food-supplies have been cut off. The men, however, seem to be as slender as the women are robust, and they, poor creatures, cannot endure a long fast. Nevertheless, the cash-drawers of the Paris shops got fat as the husbands of the wives who bought new gowns there grew more slender; and just before the ball came off these merchant princes of the Philippines actually offered to contribute five hundred dollars if another dance should be given within a short time, so great had been the rush of patrons to their attractive counters. To make a long story short, after a lot of squabbles and wranglings among those who were invited and those who were not, the night of the party came, and only those who held the coveted cards were permitted by the giants at the door to enter Paradise.