Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/172

Rh even on this; before it goes to dine or dance, it spends the whole week in trying to find out who all the Number Fours will be, or in declaring that if such and such a Number Four goes it does not think it can go itself—out of principle—all which diversions wile its time away and serve to amuse it as a box of toys a child. Not that it ever fails to go and dine or dance,—only it likes to discuss it dubiously in this way.

The Postiche ball was really a thing to move society to its depths.

The wintering-swallows had never been so fluttered about anything since the mighty and immortal question of the previous season, when a Prince of the H. R. Empire, a United Netherlands Minister, and a Duc et Pair of France, had all been asked to dinner together with their respective wives at an American house, and the hostess and all the swallows with her had lived in agonies for ten days previously, torn to pieces by the terrible doubts of Precedence; beseeching and receiving countless counsels and councillors and consulting authorities and quoting precedents