A tall young man, blonde and slight, attracts my notice. Half an hour ago he struck me as being the gayest of the gay; now his expression, as he slowly wends his way through the skaters, is sad and careworn in the extreme; the terrors of the rink are oppressing him sore, anxiety is printed on his brow; he has but one thought from start to finish—how to reach uninjured the chair he has just left. He never takes but one turn at a time round the arena, and never gains his haven of safety without a long-drawn sigh of relief. The fear of ridicule lies heavy upon him. But what will you? Rinking is the fashion, and for what does a young man live if not to follow the mode?
I see, too, the elderly gentleman, who, with bent knees and compressed mouth, essays to rival his juniors. He will be young, and he will skate, whether his doctor "will let him or no." Vive la jeunesse!
La jeunesse, in the form of a diminutive damsel, follows closely in his wake; she is of tiny build, and has her hand clasped by one of the tallest young men it has ever been my luck to behold.
"I pity that young man," says Harriet. "Titania has secured him for her own."
And indeed it seems like it. Where she may choose to lead him for the next hour there must he surely go. Were be dying to leave her, to join some other, "nearer and dearer," he will not be able to do so. Can he act the brute and ask her to sit down before she shows any inclination so to do? Can he feign fatigue when she betrays no symptoms of fagging, and regards him with a glance fresh at when they first started? He must only groan and suffer patiently, even though he knows the demon of jealousy is working mischief in the heart of his beloved as she sits silently watching him from a distant corner.
"What wonderful vitality that small creature develops!" says Harriet. "Probably, at home, if asked to rise twice from the chair, she would declare herself fatigued and ennuyee to the last degree; here she keeps in motion for an hour at a stretch, and is still smiling and radiant."
"The game seems hardly worth the candle," remarks Sir James, gazing after Titania's very insipid looking cavalier.
"My dear, it is worth ten thousand candles," returns his wife. "That is young Woodleigh, and you know he came in for all that money on his uncle's death. In such a cause you would not have her countenance fatigue?"
"Here comes her contrast," remarks Sir James, as a slight, dark woman, very pretty, with just a soupcon of coloring on her pale cheeks, and enough shading round her lids to make her dark eyes darker, skates by.
"I have been watching her," says Harriet. "She is Mrs. Elton, whose husband died last year—much to her satisfaction, as people say. See, Phyllis, how she is surrounded by admirers: every tenth minute she accepts a new aspirant to her hand, as far as rinking goes. Ah, my dear! see what it is to be a bewitching widow—far better than being a lovely girl. And James positively refuses to give me a chance of trying whether I would be a success if so circumstanced."