How simple, in the retrospect,
is the frustration of our hopes! I had not been a week in
town, had only danced once with my FIANCEE, when, one day,
taking a tennis lesson from the great Barre, a forced ball
grazed the frame of my racket, and broke a blood vessel in my
eye.
For five weeks I was shut up in a dark room. It was two more
before I again met my charmer. She did not tell me, but her
man did, that their wedding day was fixed for the 10th of the
following month; and he 'hoped they would have the pleasure
of seeing me at the breakfast!' [I made the following note
of the fact: N.B. - A woman's tears may cost her nothing;
but her smiles may be expensive.]
I must, however, do the young lady the justice to state that,
though her future husband was no great things as a 'man,' as
she afterwards discovered, he was the heir to a peerage and
great wealth. Both he and she, like most of my collaborators
in this world, have long since passed into the other.
The fashions of bygone days have always an interest for the
living: the greater perhaps the less remote. We like to
think of our ancestors of two or three generations off - the
heroes and heroines of Jane Austen, in their pantaloons and
high-waisted, short-skirted frocks, their pigtails and
powdered hair, their sandalled shoes, and Hessian boots.
