spiced meats and salads, pastries, confections and fruits; and close by is the punch-room.  You have your choice of the frozen article, or of that claret concoction to hold whose glowing ruby a bowl has been hollowed in the ice itself, or of the champagne punch, where to every litre of the champagne a litre of brandy, a litre of red rum, a litre of green tea, are given, and where you see a flushed and fevered damsel dipping the ladle and tossing off her jorum as coolly as though she had not had her three wines at dinner that day, and had not, in half the houses of her dozen morning calls, sipped her sherry or set down her little punch-glass empty of its delicious mixture of old spirits and fermenting fruit-juices.  Perhaps that sight sets you to thinking.  You may have been attracted earlier in the night by her delicate toilette and her face pure as a pearl:  you saw her later, warm from the dance, eating and drinking in the supper-room:  then her partner’s arm was round her waist, her head was on his shoulder, and she was plunging into the German, whirling to maddening measures, presently caught in a new embrace, flying from that man’s arms to another’s, growing wild with the abandon of the figure, hair flying, dress disordered, powder caked, face burning, till, pausing an instant for the champagne in a servant’s hands, your girl with the face as pure as a pearl seemed nothing but a bacchante.  And you ask yourself, “What is to be the end, for her, of these midnights rich in every delight of vanity—­the thin slipper, the bare flesh, the brain loaded with false tresses, the pores stopped with the dust of white and pink ball, the heated dance, the indigestible banquet, the scanty sleep to get which she doses herself nightly with some tremendous drug?” You wonder what emotions are stimulated by the whirling dances, the rich dainties, the breath of the exotics, the waltz-music, the common contact, the emulation of dress, the unseasonable hours, the twice-breathed air, the everlasting drams.  “I saw Florimonde going the round of her half dozen parties the other night,” wrote a “looker-on in Venice” toward the close of the last season.  “What a resplendent creature she was, the hazel-eyed beauty, with the faintest tinge of sunset hues on her oval cheeks!  Her dress was of that peculiar tarnished shade of pink—­like yellow sunshine suffusing a pale rose—­which made the white shoulders rising from it whiter and more polished yet; the panier and scarf were of yellowest point lace; and a necklace of filigree and of large pale topazes, each carved in cameo, illuminated the whole.  Maudita went out with Florimonde, too, that night, as she had gone every night for two months before.  Skirt over skirt of fluffy net flowed round Maudita, and let their misty clouds blow about the trailing ornaments of long green grasses and blue corn-flowers that she wore, while puffs and falls half veiled the stomacher of Mexican turquoise and diamond sparks, whose device imitated a spray of the same flowers; and in among