half veiled the stomacher of Mexican turquoise and diamond sparks, whose device imitated a spray of the same flowers; and in among the masses of her glittering, waving auburn hair rested a slender diadem of the turquoise again—that whose nameless tint, half blue, half green, makes it an inestimable treasure among the Navajoes, as it was once among the Aztecs, who called it the chalchivitl; each cluster of Maudita's turquoises set in a frost-work of finest diamonds—a splendid toilette indeed, as fresh and radiant as the morning dew upon the meadows. When they set out on the love-path, that is. When they came home from it, and from all the fatigues and fervors of the German, a metamorphosis. The gauzy dress was so fringed and trodden on and torn that it seemed to hold together, like many an ill-assorted marriage, by the cohesion of habit alone; the hair—Madge Wildfire's was of more respectable appearance; the powder had fallen on arms and shoulders; and to my critical eyes, if to no others, the sunset hues remained on only one of Florimonde's cheeks; and those enticing shadows round Maudita's eyes when she went out—for the best of eyes are dulled by too much wear and tear—does antimony 'run,' or had some pugilistic partner given her a 'black eye'? Not that the damsels came home in such trim on every night of the season: this was the accumulation of six parties in one night, the last of the Germans, when the fun grew fast and furious, the figures and the favors more fantastic; when daylight was breaking ere the champagne breakfast was eaten; and when the drunken coachman, out all night, had kept them shivering in the porch an endless while, and had jolted them about the carriage afterward. But they had had a glorious time: their eyes were dancing like marsh-lights, their laughter was ringing like a peal of bells, the jests and bon-mots and flattery they had heard were running off their lips like rain; they had made Goodness knows what conquests, they had made Goodness knows how many engagements; and oh, they were so tired! I ran into their room to see them next day: it was afternoon, and they were still in bed. There was nothing remarkable in that, they said: some girls were obliged to stay in bed two days out of every week through sheer fatigue, and some got so excited they couldn't sleep at all, except by means of morphia, and that made them sick a couple of days, any way; but as for themselves, they had never given out yet, and never meant to do so. While she was speaking, Florimonde's voice faltered, and the sentence was finished under the breath. Her voice had given out. At the moment the muscles round that handsome mouth of hers began to twitch ridiculously: she yawned and threw up her arms, as a baby stretches itself, and stiffened in that position, with her teeth set and her eyes rolled out of sight, and lay there like a corpse. Florimonde had given out. As I sprang to investigate this surprising condition of things, there came a sudden gurgle and a groan from Maudita, who had risen in her own little bed at my motion. I turned to see her clutching her throat, as if her hands were the claws of a wild-cat: she was laughing and howling and crying all at once; her face was of a dark purple tint; her body—that lithe and supple waltzing body of hers—was bending itself rigidly into the shape of a bow, resting by the head and the heels on the bed—the dignified Maudita!—and the foam was standing half an inch high on her mouth. Maudita had given out too. Of course the doctor came presently and separated the patients, and gave them pills and powders and bromides without end; and there were watchers to keep the delicate creatures, whom it took three or four people to hold in their fits, from injuring themselves; and at last sleep came with the all-persuading chloral, and with the awaking from that powerful chloral-given sleep came an imbecile sort of state, whose scattered wits were full of small cunning and spites, that told secrets and told lies, and could not pronounce names; and lips were blistered and eyes were swollen and purblind; and Florimonde and Maudita must keep Lent in spite of themselves. But how long do you suppose they will keep it? and in what way? As the good formalist fasts on Friday, with dishes of oysters escalloped deliciously on the shell, with toasted crabs, and bass baked in port wine. Will Florimonde forego her low necks or Maudita her blonde powder? Will there be any less excitement or rivalry in their private theatricals and concerts for charity? Will the flirtations be any less extraordinary at the high teas? The mind will be perhaps a little flighty; the health will not be so firm; there will be a good deal of morbid sorrow over imaginary misdeeds, and none at all over real ones; there will be compensatory church-going, with delightful little monogram-covered prayer-books. But will the flesh be mortified by any real rough sackcloth and ashes? It is hardly to be hoped. Neither Lent, nor religion, nor judgment, nor anything but poverty and absolute impotence, will put a period to the wild pursuit of pleasure that a fashionable season begins. Ill for the next generation, the mothers of which are wrecks before its birth! Well for Florimonde and Maudita, with all the dew and freshness of their youth destroyed, if at length, thoroughly ennuyées, they do not put a piquancy and flavor of sin into their pleasure, as the old West Indian toper dashes his insipid brandy with cayenne!"
Doubtless on such phenomena of the Season as these the ashes with which the priest sprinkles the heads of the penitents while he murmurs Memento, homo, quod pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris, falls like the Vesuvian dust upon Pompeiian revels, and they are buried beyond sight and hearing, for a time at least. But we all know that ashes are a fertilizer, and by and by there blossoms above the ruins a later season which is to the earlier one what the spirit is to the body. Everywhere outdoors, then, it is spring: the damp and windy weather has blown away, the sky is as blue as the violets and hyacinths starting untended in the sod that the soft showers have clad in a vivid verdure, and sunbeams are pouring over dome and obelisk and pillared lines of marble till they shine with dazzling lustre through the light screens of greenery. Then come the "kettle-drums," with sunset looking in for company; then the receptions are held in rooms full of sunshine, with open windows letting in the outside fragrance and bird-song and glimpses of charming landscape, or they are turned into fêtes-champêtres in the surrounding gardens; then come the riding-parties to the Falls, where last night's sylph may be to-day's Amazon in the midst of exceedingly grand scenery. Then, too, is the time for the moonlit boating where the Potomac narrows between steep and romantic banks of a sylvan wildness, and where the long oars of the swift rowers bear you as if on wings; for picnics to Rock Creek, a region of rude beauty, where the woods abound in lupines and pink azaleas, and the great white dogwood boughs stretch away into the darkness of the forest like a press of moonbeams, and where at dark your horses ford the stream and climb the hill, and bring you over the Georgetown Heights, past villas half-guessed by starlight among their gardens and fountains, and in by a market picturesque with a hundred torches flaring over the heads of mules and negroes and venders and higglers—piles of game, crisp vegetables and scarlet berries. And with this comes the excursion down river, sheet after sheet of the shining stream opening on woody loveliness remote in azure hazes, to Mount Vernon among its blossoming magnolias and rosy Judas trees, where the great tomb stands open with its sarcophagi, and where Eleanor Custis's harpsichord keeps strange company with the grim key of the Bastile that has never been moved since Washington hung it on the nail—where the quaint old rooms and verandahs and conservatories invite the guests, and the garden with its breast-high hedges of spicy box invites the lovers. Now the few ancestral mansions embower themselves in an aristocratic seclusion of trees and vines that shut them in with their birds and flowers and sunshine, and the Van Ness Place, where Washington came to lay out the city, adorns all its ancient and mossy magnificence with fresh drapery of leaves and flowers. The halls of Congress, too, are still open all day, the drama growing livelier as the adjournment draws nearer; and at evening the drives are thronged with fine equipages winding down the Fourteenth street way, out by the Soldiers' Home, through Harewood, or up by the Anacostia branch and the wild Maryland hill-roads, where wide-stretching pictures are revealed between the forest trees, while sometimes one sees, with its two rivers—one shining like silver, one red and turbid—the city lying far away, much of its outline veiled and the color of its baked brick and stone and marble mellowed in the distance, till through the quivering air and among all its towering trees it looks like a vision of antique temples in the midst of gardens of flowers. And now the numberless squares and triangles and grass-plots of the city are green as Dante's newly-broken emeralds, are a miracle of spotless deutzia and golden laburnum, honeysuckle and jasmine: half the houses are covered with ivies and grapevines; the Smithsonian grounds surround their dark and castellated group of buildings in a wilderness of bloom; and the rose has come—such roses as Sappho and Hafiz sung; deep-red roses that burn in the sun, roses that are almost black, so purple is their crimson, roses that are stainless white, long-stemmed, in generous clusters, making the air about them an intoxication in itself—roses fit to crown Anacreon. Twice a week during
