As Regina gazed admiringly at her, Olga came closer, and stood under the gas-light.

“A penny for your thoughts!  Am I handsome?  Somebody says only ’fools and children tell the truth.’  You are not exactly the latter; certainly not the former; nevertheless, being a rustic, all unversed in the fashionable accomplishment of ‘fibbing,’ you may dispense with the varnish pot and brush.  Tell me, Regina, don’t you feel inclined to fall at my feet and worship me?”

“Not in the least.  But I do think you very handsome, and your dress is quite lovely.  Are you going to a party or a ball?”

“To a ‘Reception,’ where the people will be crowded like sardines, where my puffs will be mashed as flat as buckwheat cakes, and my train will go home with various gentlemen, clinging in scraps to their boot-heels!  Were you ever at the seashore?  If you have ever chanced to walk into a settlement of fiddlers, and seen them squirming, wriggling, backward, forward, sideways, you may understand that I am going into a similar promiscuous scramble.  Human ingenuity is vastly fertile in the production of fashionable tortures; and when that outraged and indignant poet savagely asserted, that ’Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn,’ I have an abiding conviction that he had just been victimized at a ‘Reception,’ or ‘German,’ or ‘Kettle-drum,’ or ’Masque Ball,’—­or some such fine occasion, where people are amused by treading on each other’s toes, and gnawing (metaphorically) their nearest neighbour’s vertebrae.”

“Do you not enjoy going into society?”

“Cela depend! You are an unsophisticated little package of innocent rusticity, and have yet to learn

’Society is now one polished horde,
Formed of two mighty tribes,
The Bores and Bored!’

I speak advisedly, for lo these four years I have energetically preyed, and been preyed upon.  When I was your age, I was impatient to break away from my governess, and soar into the flowery pastures of fashionable gaiety, with the crowd of other butterflies that seemed so happy, so lovely; but now that I have bruised my pretty wings, and tarnished the gilding, and rubbed off the fresh enamelling, I would if I could crawl back into a safe brown cocoon, or hide in some quiet and forgotten chrysalis.  Did you ever hear of Moloch?”

“Yes, of course; I know it was a brazen image, heated red hot, in whose arms children were placed by idolatrous heathen parents.”

“No such thing! that is a foolish, obsolete Rabbinical myth.  You must not talk such old-fashioned folly.  Hearken to the solemn truth that underlies that fable; Moloch reigns here, in far more pomp and splendour than the Ammonites ever dreamed of.  Crowned and sceptred, he is now called ‘Wealth and Fashion,’ holds daily festivals and mighty orgies where salads, boned turkeys, charlotte russe, fistachio souffles, creams, ices, champagne-julep, champagne frappe, and persicot call the multitude to worship; and there while the stirring notes of Strauss ring above the sighs and groans of the heroic victims, fathers and mothers bring their sons and daughters bravely decked in broadcloth and satin, white kid and diamonds, and offer them in sacrifice; and Moloch clasps, scorches, blackens all!  Wide wonderful blue eyes, how shocked you look!”