abroad.  To bring the matter into business form, since it is a matter of business, let us say that nowhere do guests cost so much by the cubic foot as in New York.  Abroad, owing to the peculiar conditions of court-life, many people are obliged to open their houses at stated intervals.  In America no one is under this necessity.  If people begin to “entertain” they do it because they have money, or because they have something to gain by it, and they do it with an absolute regardlessness of cost which is enough to startle the sober foreigner.

It may be in bad taste, but if we are to define what is good taste in these days, and abide by it, we shall be terribly restricted.  As an exhibition of power, this enormous expenditure is imposing in the extreme; though the imposing element, being strictly confined to the display of wealth, can never produce the impressions of durability, grandeur, and military pomp so dear to every European.  Hence the Englishman turns up his nose at the gilded shows of American society, and the American sniffs when he finds that the door-scraper of some great London house is only silverplated instead of being solid, and that the carpets are at least two years old.  They regard things from opposite points of view, and need never expect to agree.

Margaret, however, was not so new to American life, seeing she was American born, as to bestow a thought or a glance on the appointments of Mr. and Mrs. Van Sueindell’s establishment; and as for Mr. Bellingham, he had never cared much for what he called the pomp and circumstance of pleasure, for he carried pleasure with him in his brilliant conversation and his ready tact.  All places were more or less alike to Mr. Bellingham.  At the present moment, however, he was thinking principally of his fair charge, and was wondering inwardly what time he would get home, for he rose early and was fond of a nap in the late evening.  He therefore gave Margaret his arm, and kept a lookout for some amusing man to introduce to her.  He had really enjoyed his dinner and the pleasant chat afterwards, but the prospect of piloting this magnificent beauty about till morning, or till she should take it into her head to go home, was exhausting.  Besides, he went little into society of this kind, and was not over-familiar with the faces he saw.

He need not have been disturbed, however, for they had not been many minutes in the rooms before a score of men had applied for the “pleasure of a turn.”  But still she held Mr. Bellingham’s arm, obdurately refusing to dance.  As Barker came up a moment later, willing, perhaps, to show his triumph to the rejected suitors, Margaret thanked Mr. Bellingham, and offered to take him home if he would stay until one o’clock; then she glided away, not to dance but to sit in a quieter room, near the door of which couples would hover for a quarter of an hour at a time waiting to seize the next pair of vacant seats.  Mr. Bellingham moved away, amused by the music and the crowd and the fair young faces, until he found a seat in a corner, shaded from the flare of light by an open door close by, and there, in five minutes, he was fast asleep in the midst of the gaiety and noise and heat—­unnoticed, a gray old man amid so much youth.