"Your antagonist," said he, "was a sure winner, but his services were purchased by your husband, and now that he has won you to his love, and to a sense of your own dignity, he makes over to you this recovered fortune."
And the French chronicler goes on to paint a pretty scene as a hint for those dramatists who choose to put the affair on the stage. And he further says that the story is well authenticated, as he might prove by giving the parties' names; but upon consideration, he favors us only with an X.
If the story is a lie, all we can say is, that Eugene Guinot must take the blame of it: and judging from his experience, we think the blame will sit lightly on him.
We have wandered so far from the town, that we had half forgotten that there was any town at all. But, after all, there lies but a step nowadays between Paris and New York—a step over sea, and a step over a very narrow bridge of morals. True, we have not yet imported the salon gambling, except in a quiet club-way, where surely vagrant bachelors, it would seem, have as good right to stultify themselves, as they have in most other situations in life. It is to be doubted, however, if gaming does not presently come into the round of amusements. Old methods do not last long in our growing society: and as evidence, we may note the abandonment, the present year, of the fancy balls, which, for four or five seasons back, have made the very Elysium of a summer's festivities.
What matter has been made of it under the new dispensation of undisguised ball costume, the papers have not much informed us: indeed it is richly observable, that when the fashions of the day withdraw from outré action, and shed those enormities of feature which excite the stare of the vulgar—just so soon the public press respects their modesty, and gives them the award of silence. As a consequence (for the sequitur may not appear, in the illogical order of our after-dinner arrangement) little has been said this year of the "dress balls" of Saratoga and Newport: and the catalogues of watering-place Deities have been transferred from the flash-papers, to the roll-books of the marriageable men. A few sharp days of early September (not far from the date of our writing) will have driven our city people away from those shores, where the eastern fogs come sailing in laden with agues, and dropped them down here and there, along those sheltered hill-sides of inland repute, which bask in a summer morning, and which, by and by, will smoke with the kindling glory of an Indian summer.
As yet few have found their way to the town itself: and those few find the streets full of bustle, of strangers, of dust, and of Cuba. It strikes a man oddly, who has been taking his siesta the summer through, under the shadow of country-grown trees, and in the hearing of birds, until he has grown into a sort of assimilation with country habit and country talk, to rebound upon a sudden, from the hard, frosted hill-sides into the very centre of this great furnace of business—and to find it all sweltering and panting with its labor, just as it did six months gone by, and just as it will do in six months to come! Your country idler, with the conceit of the city on him, somehow conceives the idea, that without him there will be less noise, and less commotion: and yet he may go and come, and take his thousands, and bring his thousands, and shout at his loudest, and the great city, quite careless of it all, still sends up from her pebbled veins, and her sweeping quays, the same unceasing roar.
We have forewarned our reader, or should have done it, that we shall shift our topic in these our after-dinner musings, as easy as the turning of a leaf. Our eyes have just now fallen upon a passage in Mr. Greeley's last letter from Europe, in which he speaks of the appearance of the English women, and commends, with a little more than his usual ardor of expression, their perfection of figure. He attributes this, and very justly, to the English lady's habit of out-of-door exercise. We had thought that this fact was known: that it was known years ago, and that our fair country-women would catch a hint from it, that would throw color into their cheeks and fullness into their forms. And yet, sadly enough, our ladies still coop themselves in their heated rooms, until their faces are like lilies, and their figures—like lily stems!
We have alluded to the matter now, not for the sake of pointing a satire surely, but for the sake of asking those one or two hundred thousand ladies, who every month light our pages with their looks, if they do indeed prize a little unnatural pearliness of hue, and delicacy of complexion, beyond that ruddy flush of health (the very tempter of a kiss!) and that full development of figure, which all the poets, from Homer down, have made one of the chiefest beauties of a woman?