She gathered together her fan and gloves, for she had petulantly dragged off a pair which did not fit.

“And you will ask Maggie to come with us?” she said.

He held open the door for her to pass out, gravely polite even to his wife—­this old-fashioned man.

“Yes,” he answered; “but why do you want me to ask her?”

“Because I want her to come.”

CHAPTER XVII

CHARITY

In these democratic days a very democratic theory has exploded.  Not so very long ago we believed, or made semblance of belief, that it is useless to put a high price upon a ticket with the object of securing that selectness for which the high-born crave.  “If they want to come,” Lady Champignon (wife of Alderman Champignon) would say, “they do not mind paying the extra half-guinea.”

But Lady Champignon was wrong.  It is not that the self-made man cannot or will not pay two guineas for a ball-ticket.  It is merely that, in his commercial way, he thinks that he will not have his money’s worth, and therefore prefers keeping his two guineas to spend on something more tangible—­say food.  The nouveau riche never quite purges his mind of the instinct commercial, and it therefore goes against the grain to pay heavily for a form of entertainment which his soul had not the opportunity of learning to love in its youth.  The aristocrat, on the other hand, has usually been brought up to the cultivation of enjoyment, and he therefore spends with perfect equanimity more on his pleasure than the bourgeois mind can countenance.

The ball to which Paul and Etta were going was managed by some titled ladies who knew their business well.  The price of the tickets was fabulous.  The lady patronesses of the great Charity Ball were tactful and unabashed.  They drew the necessary line (never more necessary than it is to-day) with a firm hand.

The success of the ball was therefore a foregone conclusion.  In French fiction there is invariably a murmur of applause when the heroine enters a room full of people, which fact serves, at all events, to show the breeding and social status of persons with whom French novelists are in the habit of associating.  There was therefore no applause when Paul and Etta made their appearance, but that lady had, nevertheless, the satisfaction of perceiving glances, not only of admiration, but of interest and even of disapproval, among her own sex.  Her dress she knew to be perfect, and when she perceived the craning pale face of the inevitable lady-journalist, peering between the balusters of a gallery, she thoughtfully took up a prominent position immediately beneath that gallery, and slowly turned round like a beautifully garnished joint before the fire of cheap publicity.