renders perfectly unexceptionable, enabling them to see and know each other better than, perhaps, any other mode of general association. Tete-a-tetes are dangerous things.  Small family parties are too much under mutual observation.  A ball-room appears to me almost the only scene uniting that degree of rational and innocent liberty of intercourse, which it is desirable to promote as much as possible between young persons, with that scrupulous attention to the delicacy and propriety of female conduct, which I consider the fundamental basis of all our most valuable social relations.

Mr Escot. There would be some plausibility in your argument, if it were not the very essence of this species of intercourse to exhibit them to each other under false colours.  Here all is show, and varnish, and hypocrisy, and coquetry; they dress up their moral character for the evening at the same toilet where they manufacture their shapes and faces.  Ill-temper lies buried under a studied accumulation of smiles.  Envy, hatred, and malice, retreat from the countenance, to entrench themselves more deeply in the heart.  Treachery lurks under the flowers of courtesy.  Ignorance and folly take refuge in that unmeaning gabble which it would be profanation to call language, and which even those whom long experience in “the dreary intercourse of daily life” has screwed up to such a pitch of stoical endurance that they can listen to it by the hour, have branded with the ignominious appellation of “small talk.”  Small indeed!—­the absolute minimum of the infinitely little.

Mr Jenkison. Go on.  I have said all I intended to say on the favourable side.  I shall have great pleasure in hearing you balance the argument.

Mr Escot. I expect you to confess that I shall have more than balanced it.  A ball-room is an epitome of all that is most worthless and unamiable in the great sphere of human life.  Every petty and malignant passion is called into play.  Coquetry is perpetually on the alert to captivate, caprice to mortify, and vanity to take offence.  One amiable female is rendered miserable for the evening by seeing another, whom she intended to outshine, in a more attractive dress than her own; while the other omits no method of giving stings to her triumph, which she enjoys with all the secret arrogance of an oriental sultana.  Another is compelled to dance with a monster she abhors.  A third has set her heart on dancing with a particular partner, perhaps for the amiable motive of annoying one of her dear friends:  not only he does not ask her, but she sees him dancing with that identical dear friend, whom from that moment she hates more cordially than ever.  Perhaps, what is worse than all, she has set her heart on refusing some impertinent fop, who does not give her the opportunity.—­As to the men, the case is very nearly the same with them.  To be sure, they have the privilege of making the