and in what way? As the good formalist fasts on Friday, with dishes of
oysters escalloped deliciously on the shell, with toasted crabs,
and bass baked in port wine. Will Florimonde forego her low necks
or Maudita her blonde powder? Will there be any less excitement or
rivalry in their private theatricals and concerts for charity? Will
the flirtations be any less extraordinary at the high teas? The mind
will be perhaps a little flighty; the health will not be so firm;
there will be a good deal of morbid sorrow over imaginary misdeeds,
and none at all over real ones; there will be compensatory
church-going, with delightful little monogram-covered prayer-books.
But will the flesh be mortified by any real rough sackcloth and ashes?
It is hardly to be hoped. Neither Lent, nor religion, nor judgment,
nor anything but poverty and absolute impotence, will put a period to
the wild pursuit of pleasure that a fashionable season begins. Ill for
the next generation, the mothers of which are wrecks before its birth!
Well for Florimonde and Maudita, with all the dew and freshness of
their youth destroyed, if at length, thoroughly ennuyées, they do not
put a piquancy and flavor of sin into their pleasure, as the old West
Indian toper dashes his insipid brandy with cayenne!"

Doubtless on such phenomena of the Season as these the ashes with
which the priest sprinkles the heads of the penitents while he murmurs
_Memento, homo, quod pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris_, falls like
the Vesuvian dust upon Pompeiian revels, and they are buried beyond
sight and hearing, for a time at least. But we all know that ashes
are a fertilizer, and by and by there blossoms above the ruins a later
season which is to the earlier one what the spirit is to the body.
Everywhere outdoors, then, it is spring: the damp and windy weather
has blown away, the sky is as blue as the violets and hyacinths
starting untended in the sod that the soft showers have clad in a