Her uncle insisted on a ride or walk every day, callers began to come, hours had to be spent in the drawing-room, and work on the new dresses to be pushed all the harder the rest of the day to recover lost time.
Then she must attire herself in her most becoming finery, and drive out with Mrs. Dinsmore to return her calls, during which the talk generally ran upon the merest trifles, furnishing no food for mind or heart.
Flatteries and compliments were showered upon our heroine, for she was pretty, graceful and refined, quick at repartee, self-possessed, without being conceited, well informed for her years, and a good conversationalist.
Her aunt and uncle were altogether satisfied with the impression she made; but her parents would have been sorely troubled could they have known how the world and its vanities were engrossing the thoughts of their beloved child, to the exclusion of better things.
There were brilliant entertainments given in her honor; first, by Mrs. Dinsmore, afterward by others who had been her invited guests.
The weather continuing remarkably mild and pleasant for some weeks, there were excursions gotten up to various points of interest in the vicinity; there were dinner parties and tea drinkings; days when the house was filled with gay company from morning to night, or when Mr. and Mrs. Dinsmore visited in like manner at the houses of neighboring planters, taking Mildred with them.
Then there were drives to the city: in the daytime to shop for more finery, in the evening for the purpose of attending some place of amusement,—now a concert, now a lecture, and at length the opera and the theatre.
Into these latter and questionable, not to say forbidden, places of resort, to one reared as Mildred had been, she was at first decoyed; but becoming intoxicated with their sensual sweets, she went again and again of her own free will.