Instead of receiving your list, you are
obliged to send messengers in all directions to announce that your
ball is postponed, although you are perfectly aware that not a single
individual would have been present whom you would have cared to welcome.
The ball is postponed; and next day the _Morning Post_ informs us it is
postponed to that day week; and the day after you have circulated this
interesting intelligence, you yourself, perhaps, have the gratification
of receiving an invitation, for the same day, to Lady St. Julians': with
'dancing' neatly engraved in the corner. You yield in despair; and
there are some ladies who, with every qualification for an excellent
ball-guests, Gunter, American plants, pretty daughters have been
watching and waiting for years for an opportunity of giving it; and at
last, quite hopeless, at the end of the season, expend their funds in
a series of Greenwich banquets, which sometimes fortunately produce the
results expected from the more imposing festivity.
You see, therefore, that giving a ball is not that matter-of-course
affair you imagined; and that for Mrs. Guy Flouncey to give a ball and
succeed, completely, triumphantly to succeed, was a feat worthy of that
fine social general. Yet she did it.
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