beauty, the hope of conquest, the consciousness of power--better than the
dull monotony of the Devonshire cottage? Be honest--"

"No, no, indeed!" answered Evelyn, tearfully and passionately; "one hour
with my mother, one smile from her lips, were worth it all."

"And in your visions of marriage, you think then of nothing but roses and
doves,--love in a cottage!"

"Love _in a home_, no matter whether a palace or a cottage," returned
Evelyn.

"Home!" repeated Caroline, bitterly; "home,--home is the English synonym
for the French _ennui_. But I hear Papa on the stairs."

A ballroom--what a scene of commonplace! how hackneyed in novels! how
trite in ordinary life! and yet ballrooms have a character and a
sentiment of their own, for all tempers and all ages. Something in the
lights, the crowd, the music, conduces to stir up many of the thoughts
that belong to fancy and romance. It is a melancholy scene to men after
a certain age. It revives many of those lighter and more graceful images
connected with the wandering desires of youth,--shadows that crossed us,
and seemed love, but were not; having much of the grace and charm, but
none of the passion and the tragedy, of love. So many of our earliest
and gentlest recollections are connected with those chalked floors, and
that music painfully gay, and those quiet nooks and corners, where the
talk that hovers about the heart and does not touch it has been held.
Apart and unsympathizing in that austerer wisdom which comes to us after
deep passions have been excited, we see form after form chasing the
butterflies that dazzle us no longer among the flowers that have evermore