Page:A hairdresser's experience in high life.djvu/53

Rh Saratoga, that it would be utterly useless for any lady, from Maine to California, to go there and attempt to pass off as her own the smallest articles of hired or borrowed jewelry. It would be found out before she had been there twenty-four hours, and the whisperings of the Paul Pry circles and their accomplices would drive her out of the town in twenty-four more.

The ball-room at Saratoga is between three and four hundred feet in length, and proportionate in width; it is adorned with huge mirrors and glittering chandeliers; the floor is smooth and glassy, and the music always the finest in the world. Upon dancing evenings, dress is here displayed in every variety of elegance. A Saratoga ball is a gorgeous scene. The "Lanciers" and the round dances form the almost entire amusement of the evening at the present time—to the utter exclusion of the old-fashioned and monotonous quadrille. The German quadrille is usually danced in the drawing-room in the mornings, between breakfast and dinner.

From the ball-room, after the ladies are disposed of, the gentlemen usually repair to the club-rooms of the hotel, where they generally make a night of it—and where, by some strange process or other, many of them find themselves, at the dawn of the next day, divested of means for remaining any longer in this fashionable atmosphere—the consequence of which is that the wives and daughters who shone the most brilliantly upon the promenade and in the drawing-room the day before, are to-day hustled off for home, very mysteriously, in the first train of cars. No one knows why or wherefore, only that Mrs. So-and-So was heard scolding and ranting, and her daughters 5