in which matrimony was a Cinderella before the ball, cuffed in curl-papers rather than kissed in crystal slippers.  They sat rather silent.  One consisted of a father, a mother and two daughters, the latter in large flowered hats.  The father smoked.  The mother looked furtive in a bonnet, and the two daughters, with wide open eyes, examined the flirtations around them as a child examines a butterfly caught in a net.  One of them blushed.  But she did not turn away her eyes.  Nor were her girlish ears inactive.  Family life seemed suddenly to become dull to her.  She wondered whether it were life at all.  And the father still smoked domestically.  He knew it all.  That was the difference.  And perhaps it was his knowledge that made him serenely content with domesticity and the three women who belonged to him.  Two boys, who had come up from a public school for the race, and had forgotten to go back, sat at the end of a row in glistening white collars and neat ties, almost angrily observant of all that was going on around them.  For them the dance of the hours was already begun, and already become a can-can.  They watched it with an eager interest and excitement, and the calm self-possession with which some of the men near them made jokes to magnificently dressed women with diamond earrings struck them dumb with admiration.  Yet, later on, they too were fated to join in the dance, when the stars affected to sleep on the clouds and the moon lay wearily inattentive to the pilgrims of the night, like an invalid in a blue boudoir.  On the thick carpet by the wall attendants stood loaded with programmes.  One of them, very trim and respectable, in a white cap, was named Clara and offered a drink by an impudent Oxonian.  She giggled with all the vanity of sixteen, happily forgetful of her husband and of the seven children who called her mother.  Yet the dance of the hours was a venerable saraband to her, and she often wished she was in bed as she stood listening to the familiar music.  In the enclosure set apart for the orchestra the massed musicians earned their living violently in the midst of the gaily dressed idlers, who heard them with indifference, and saw them as wound-up marionettes.  The drummer hammered on his blatant instrument with all the crude skill of his tribe, producing occasional terrific noises with darting fists, while his face remained as immovable as that of a Punchinello.  A flautist piped romantically an Arcadian measure, while his prominent eyes stared about over the chattering audience as if in search of some one.  Suddenly he gave a “couac.”  He had seen his sweetheart in the distance with a youth from Christ Church.  The conductor turned on the estrade in the centre of the orchestra and scowled at him, and he hastened to become Arcadian once again, gazing at his flute as if the devil had entered into it.  In a doorway shrouded with heavy curtains two acting managers talked warily, their hands in retreat behind their coat-tails.  They surveyed