"Although Mrs. Houston has a very large house for New-York, and lives in a uniform style, you are not to expect ante-chambers, and vast suites of rooms, Eve," said Grace; "such as you have been accustomed to see abroad."
"It is not necessary, my dear cousin, to enter a house of four or five windows in front, to see it is not a house of twenty or thirty. I should be very unreasonable to expect an Italian palazzo, or a Parisian hotel, in this good town."
"We are not old enough for that yet, Eve; a hundred years hence, Mademoiselle Viefville, such things may exist here."
"Bien sûr. C'est naturel."
"A hundred years hence, as the world tends, Grace, they are not likely to exist any where, except as taverns, or hospitals, or manufactories. But what have we to do, coz, with a century ahead of us? young as we both are, we cannot hope to live that time."
Grace would have been puzzled to account satisfactorily to herself, for the strong desire she felt that neither of her companions should expect to see such a house as their senses so plainly told them did not exist in the place; but her foot moved in the bottom of the carriage, for she was not half satisfied with her cousin's answer.
"All I mean. Eve," she said, after a pause, "is, that one ought not to expect in a town as new as this, the improvements that one sees in an older state of society."
"And have Mademoiselle Viefville, or I, ever been so weak as to suppose, that New-York is Paris, or Rome, or Vienna?"
Grace was still less satisfied, for, unknown to herself, she had hoped that Mrs. Houston's ball might be quite equal to a ball in either of those ancient capitals; and she was now vexed that her cousin considered it so much a matter of course that it should not be. But there was no time for explanations, as the carriage now stopped.
The noise, confusion, calling out, swearing, and rude clamour before the house of Mrs. Houston, said little for the out-door part of the arrangements. Coachmen are nowhere a particularly silent and civil class; but the uncouth European peasants, who have been preferred to the honours of the whip in New-York, to the usual feelings of competition and contention, added that particular feature of humility which is known to distinguish "the beggar on horseback." The imposing equipages of our party, however, had that effect on most of these rude brawlers, which a display of wealth is known to produce on the vulgar-minded; and the ladies got into the house, through a lane of coachmen, by yielding a little to a chevau de frise of whips, without any serious calamity.