The card of the débutante, if the ball is given for one, is enclosed.
If a hostess gives her ball at some public place, like Delmonico's, she has but little trouble. The compliment is not the same as if she gave it in her own house, however. If there is room, a ball in a private house is much more agreeable, and a greater honour to the guest.
Gentlemen who have not an acquaintance should be presented to the young dancing set; but first, of course, to the chaperon. As, however, the hostess cannot leave her post while receiving, she should have two or three friends to help her. Great care should be taken that there be no wall-flowers, no neglected girls. The non-dancers in an American ball are like the non-Catholics in a highly doctrinal sermon: they are nowhere, pushed into a corner where there is perhaps a draught, and the smell of fried oysters. Such is the limbo of the woman of forty or over, who in Europe would be the belle, the person just beginning to have a career. For it is too true that the woman who has learned something, who is still beautiful, the woman who has maturity and experience, is pushed to the wall in America, while in Europe she is courted and admired. Society holds out all its attractive distractions and comforts to such a woman in Europe; in America it keeps everything, even its comforts, for the very young.
The fact that American ballrooms, or rather the parlours of our ordinary houses, are wholly disproportioned to the needs of society, has led to the giving of balls at Delmonico's and other public places. If these are under proper patronage there is no reason why they should not be as entertaining, as exclusive, and as respectable as a ball at home. Any hostess or group of managers should, if they give up a ball at home and use the large accommodations of Delmonico or the Assembly Rooms, certainly consider the claims of chaperons and mammas who must wearily sit through the German. It is to be feared that attention to the mamma is not yet a grace in which even her daughter excels. Young men who wish to marry mademoiselle had better pay her mother the compliment of getting her a seat, and social leaders should also show her the greatest attention, not alone from the selfish reason which the poet commemorates:—
"Philosophy has got a charm,—
I thought of Martin Tupper,—
And offering mamma my arm,
I took her down to supper.
"I gave her Pommery, Côte d'Or,
Which seethed in rosy bubbles;