sion goes when the young girl finds her own Eden neither the brightest nor the best, nor an individual creation; the last goes when she finds that she is not the only woman in it, but that Eves are under every tree.
When they looked at anything, they looked at themselves in the mirrors, or at their partners, not at the crow's-feet and wrinkles which had travelled from the hearts to the faces of the débutantes of twenty-five years ago, the possessors, then, of a paradise too.
The young girls had of course consulted the bonne aventure about him,—the future one whom they hoped to meet this or some other near evening. Was he to be fair or brown, tall or short, widower or bachelor? Candles were even now burning before distant altars to hasten his coming, placed by the zealous hands of some of those very nurses out on the stairs; the saints were being arraigned, perhaps, by some of the impatient mother-spectators about him; all to be forgotten in the supreme moment by the most interested ones! Quadrilles, deux-temps, and waltzes succeeded one another; but the heedless young girls thought only of the pleas-
