ball-room. Can anything be more maddening, I wonder, than good music and a bad partner? Lord St. John does not wait for an opening, but gripping me round the waist, plunges wildly into the melée. On watching him I had been struck by the way in which he appeared to run away from his partner: on careering with him, I find that—proud and happy as I should be to be left out of his gyrations altogether—there is no such luck, for he holds on to me like grim death, "without any regard to my squalls or my kicks" (as a poet once wrote of a victim very little worse off than I), and that fast as he tears round me I am forced into a very similar and indecently hasty appearance of likewise tearing round him. In vain I ask him to stop. . . . I am, indeed, too deeply engaged in the all-absorbing business of holding on, and praying that Providence will bring me out of this galére without the loss of my front teeth, to say much; so on we rush, running full tilt at the company; dashing into the couples before us, recoiling violently on to those behind; landing with convulsive energy on the wallflowers' toes, taking headers into the wall or space, pelted with blows, harassed with return kicks, abraded with sharp elbows, verily we run a race as perilous as ever did Dick Turpin, but are not, like him, clothed with honour, but disgrace!
"Stop!" I cry loudly, when we have upset our fourth couple, and only saved ourselves from rolling upon their prostrate forms by a succession of aërial bounds that would not have done discredit to Taglioni. "Stop!" And being tired by his exertions, he looses me, and I tumble into a chair, and go very near to weeping. There is a smile on the countenances of the lookers on, the very wallflowers are grinning—nasty little wretches, who would not object to be twirled round like mops, rather than not dance at all! Examining into the extent of my injuries, I find that I have a lump on my forehead that will probably be black and blue to-morrow, a partially-skinned arm, and a tolerably
