had done some service somewhere, while Potiphar was only an honest man
who made a fortune.

The supper-room was a pleasant place. The table was covered with a chaos
of supper. Everything sweet and rare, and hot and cold, solid and
liquid, was there. It was the very apotheosis of gilt gingerbread. There
was a universal rush and struggle. The charge of the guards at Waterloo
was nothing to it. Jellies, custard, oyster-soup, ice-cream, wine and
water, gushed in profuse cascades over transparent precipices of
_tulle_, muslin, gauze, silk and satin. Clumsy boys tumbled against
costly dresses and smeared them with preserves; when clean plates
failed, the contents of plates already used were quietly "chucked" under
the table--heel-taps of champagne were poured into the oyster tureens or
overflowed upon plates to clear the glasses--wine of all kinds flowed in
torrents, particularly down the throats of very young men, who evinced
their manhood by becoming noisy, troublesome, and disgusting, and were
finally either led, sick, into the hat room, or carried out of the way,
drunk. The supper over, the young people, attended by their matrons,
descended to the dancing-room for the "German." This is a dance
commencing usually at midnight or a little after, and continuing
indefinitely toward daybreak. The young people were attended by their
matrons, who were there to supervise the morals and manners of their
charges. To secure the performance of this duty, the young people took
good care to sit where the matrons could not see them, nor did they, by
any chance, look toward the quarter in which the matrons sat. In that
quarter, through all the varying mazes of the prolonged dance, to two
o'clock, to three, to four, sat the bediamonded dowagers, the mothers,
the matrons--against nature, against common sense. They babbled with
each other, they drowsed, they dozed. Their fans fell listless into
their laps. In the adjoining room, out of the waking sight, even, of the