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If we had been tramping on a hard floor never a sound of his weak violin could have been heard; but on the soft, pine tags we could go through the mazes of a cotillion, or the lancers, with apparently as much life as if our couples had been composed of the two sexes. The greatest difficulty incurred, in having a game of ball, was the procurement of a ball that would survive even one inning.
She could recall a great many times when Timothy had been proved right in his deductions, which surely ought to have made her place more value on the one concerning Mr. Bennet than she had. Arethusa felt, just then, as if she would even rather that Miss Eliza should know of that Episode at the January Cotillion than that Timothy should know about it.
Shunning the entrancing waltz, the inspiring "Monnie Musk" and the cotillion, lively when set to Christy's melodies, she had sought the more juvenile element, and, when seen by the land baron, was circling around with fluttering skirts.
Its effect was to make his heart cold towards her, instead of awakening an ardent desire to win a proud and distant beauty. In vain did Margaret look for the young man to press forward, the moment the cotillion was dissolved, and claim her for the next. He lingered by the side of Miss Edgar, more charmed with her than he had ever been, until some one else came and engaged the hand of Miss Hubert.
She had bought it three and more years ago, when she first came to London, at the beginning of that time of girl-gaiety when all life seemed a long cotillion, and she its leader. Its cool daintiness made it seem the symbol of another world, a world without depths or shadows, a world that did not feel a happy world! She had not long to wait before he tapped on the drawing-room window.
It was so like Timothy to have the last word and then run away, that after Arethusa got over her violent anger with him for the Words of Blasphemy he had spoken of the Wonderful Mr. Bennet, she laughed and laughed at the thought. How many times he had done the very same thing! Then came what Ross had called the "Real Event of the Season" that long looked-forward-to January Cotillion.
For at least a decade he had been invaluable to Lichfield matrons alike against the entertainment of an "out-of-town girl," the management of a cotillion and the prevention of unpleasant pauses among incongruous dinner companies.
The whole of their hilarity seems to consist in the movement of the dance, in which they are by not means animated; and I have seen, even among the common people, a cotillion performed as gravely and as mechanically as the ceremonies of a Chinese court. I have always thought, with Sterne, that we were mistaken in supposing the French a gay nation.
To the exclamations, the riotous shouts and whoops, the general gay vociferations and the footsteps of a busy people, the harangues of the barkers, the more distant puffing and shrieking of the locomotives at the railroad yards, the hammering where men and boys worked by torchlight, and now and then a revolver shot, there had been added the inciting music of stringed instruments, cymbals, and such some in dance measures, some solo, while immediately at hand sounded the shuffling stamp of waltz, hoe-down and cotillion.
And a feminine person who went through more than three seasons of Lewisburg society without her share of spoils from the January Cotillion, was indisputably a Rank Failure. But Arethusa had no lack of favors from the very beginning of this affair, thus indicating partners. Her spoils were amply sufficient for her to show in proof that she was a Social Success, and not a Failure. Mr.
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