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Updated: July 10, 2025
She remembered how beautifully, intoxicatingly deferential he had been to her in her charming ball-dress, niece to the lady who was wife of the most influential man in Workingham. Words could not express how he must despise her if he saw her now. "They make you judge at all the beauty shows in India, I suppose?" the lively lady was saying. "They'd like to. I couldn't stand the fag." "Poor dear!
Kirkpatrick had given her the ball-dress. But there really was nothing for her to fidget herself about. Roger only said he had had another touch of fever, but was better when he wrote. He says every European has to be acclimatized by fever in that part of Abyssinia where he is. 'And did she go? asked Molly. 'Yes, to be sure. It is not an engagement; and if it were, it is not acknowledged.
For, thanks to her eminence as a local beauty, she had not that fear of beautiful and rich things which renders abject people incapable of associating costliness with comfort. Had the counterpane of the bed been her own, she would have unhesitatingly converted it into a ball-dress. There were toilet appliances of which she had never felt the need, and could only guess the use.
"Why, yes," replied I, looking up; "what fault do you find? But is that your ball-dress?" No change had taken place in the ordinary raiment of my friend. The fringed hunting-shirt and leggings, the belt, the bowie, and the pistols, were all before me. "Yes, my dandy; this is my ball-dress: it ain't anything shorter; and if you'll take my advice, you'll wear what you have got on your back.
Jeanne's face brightened, as she stood listening for a moment and heard the carriage which contained her husband rolling away. Uttering a sigh of relief, she murmured: "At last!" Jeanne had just taken off her ball-dress to put on a dressing-gown of Oriental cloth richly embroidered with silk flowers. Leaning her elbows on the mantelpiece, and breathing heavily, she was waiting.
She waved him an adieu from the window, and stood there for a moment looking out after he was gone. The cathedral towers and the full gables of the quaint old houses were just beginning to blush in the sunrise. There had been no rest for her that night. She was still in her pretty ball-dress, her fair hair hanging somewhat out of curl on her neck, and the circles round her eyes dark with watching.
There was Vera looking out through clouds of her own dark hair hanging loosely about her face; Vera as a Bacchante crowned with vine leaves, laughing saucily; Vera draped as a dévote, with drooping eyes and hands crossed meekly upon her bosom. Sometimes she would be in a ball-dress, with lace about her white shoulders; sometimes muffled up in winter sables, her head covered with a fur cap.
At this moment a small secret door in the wall at the bottom of the stage slips aside, and Thisbe, still wearing her ball-dress, and with a head-dress of gold sequins flashing in her black hair, is discovered crouching in the aperture, holding an antique lamp in one hand, a little raised, and with the other softly putting aside the door, while, bending forward with a cat-like stillness, she glares around the chamber with eager eyes, that flash upon everything at once.
"What a pity, what a pity!" half sighed, half pouted Bertha. "It is too bad, too provoking!" ejaculated Maurice. "If there be no obstacle but the lack of a ball-dress for yourself and for Bertha, aunt," remarked Madeleine, "we may console ourselves; for we will go to the ball." "Oh, you dear, good, ingenious Madeleine!" exclaimed Bertha, throwing her arms around her cousin.
It had that woebegone, forsaken, tawdry appearance, which reminds one so much of a ball-dress, the morning after.
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