are very young and pretty, extravagance in costume carries its own excuse.
To the dance they went: the dancing was bad, the music worse, and instead of ice, sago was handed round to keep the young people from taking cold. Yet Cecil had passed worse evenings. We talk of unsophisticated nature—I should like to know where it is to be found. Elizabeth Temple's hair did curl naturally—she made her own dresses—and for accomplishments, played on her grandmother’s spinnet by ear, knitted purses, and took the housekeeping alternate weeks with her sister;—yet had she talents for flirtation at least equal to those of any young lady whose dress and accomplishments are the perfection of milliners and May Fair. Cecil was her partner the most of the evening; and, by a few ingenious and invidious parallels, implied not expressed, between him and the other cavaliers,—that preference of attention, the best of feminine flattery,—and a deference to his opinion, nicely blended with a self-consciousness of prettiness, Elizabeth contrived to keep him rather pleasantly awake. Mr. Temple's house lay in his way home; and though he had already ate supper enough for six months, his friends would make him go in for another. On his departure, Elizabeth gave him some trifling commission at Hastings; and while she was writing it down, Forrester, with that universal habit of the idle, took up whatever happened to be near, in the laudable intention of
