well done? They had enjoyed it very much, he said. I could only
stare in answer, and wonder what had become of the man's tastes or
his principles; he was either humbugging himself or he was
humbugging me. After that I left them alone, and suffered through
the rest of the play with what relief I could get from laughing when
the pathetic emotions of the drama became too poignant. I decided
that Kendricks was absorbed in the study of his companion's mind,
which must be open to his contemporaneous eye as it could never have
been to my old-sighted glasses, and I envied him the knowledge he
was gaining of that type of American girl. It suddenly came to me
that he must be finding his account in this, and I felt a little
less regret for the waste of civilities, of attentions, which
sometimes seemed to me beyond her appreciation.

I, for my part, gave myself to the study of the types about me, and
I dwelt long and luxuriously upon the vision of a florid and massive
matron in diaphanous evening dress, whom I imagined to be revisiting
the glimpses of her girlhood in the ancient watering-place, and to
be getting all the gaiety she could out of it. These are the
figures one mostly sees at Saratoga; there is very little youth of
the present day there, but the youth of the past abounds, with the
belated yellow hair and the purple moustaches, which gave a notion
of greater wickedness in a former generation.

I made my observation that the dress, even in extreme cases of
elderly prime, was very good--in the case of the women, I mean; the
men there, as everywhere with us, were mostly slovens; and I was
glad to find that the good taste and the correct fashion were
without a colour-line; there were some mulatto ladies present as
stylish as their white sisters, or step-sisters.