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Skirt over skirt of fluffy net flowed round Maudita, and let their misty clouds blow about the trailing ornaments of long green grasses and blue corn-flowers that she wore, while puffs and falls 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.

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.