as if her hands were the claws of a wild-cat:  she was laughing and howling and crying all at once; her face was of a dark purple tint; her body—­that lithe and supple waltzing body of hers—­was bending itself rigidly into the shape of a bow, resting by the head and the heels on the bed—­the dignified Maudita!—­and the foam was standing half an inch high on her mouth.  Maudita had given out too.  Of course the doctor came presently and separated the patients, and gave them pills and powders and bromides without end; and there were watchers to keep the delicate creatures, whom it took three or four people to hold in their fits, from injuring themselves; and at last sleep came with the all-persuading chloral, and with the awaking from that powerful chloral-given sleep came an imbecile sort of state, whose scattered wits were full of small cunning and spites, that told secrets and told lies, and could not pronounce names; and lips were blistered and eyes were swollen and purblind; and Florimonde and Maudita must keep Lent in spite of themselves.  But how long do you suppose they will keep it? and in what way?  As the good formalist fasts on Friday, with dishes of oysters escalloped deliciously on the shell, with toasted crabs, and bass baked in port wine.  Will Florimonde forego her low necks or Maudita her blonde powder?  Will there be any less excitement or rivalry in their private theatricals and concerts for charity?  Will the flirtations be any less extraordinary at the high teas?  The mind will be perhaps a little flighty; the health will not be so firm; there will be a good deal of morbid sorrow over imaginary misdeeds, and none at all over real ones; there will be compensatory church-going, with delightful little monogram-covered prayer-books.  But will the flesh be mortified by any real rough sackcloth and ashes?  It is hardly to be hoped.  Neither Lent, nor religion, nor judgment, nor anything but poverty and absolute impotence, will put a period to the wild pursuit of pleasure that a fashionable season begins.  Ill for the next generation, the mothers of which are wrecks before its birth!  Well for Florimonde and Maudita, with all the dew and freshness of their youth destroyed, if at length, thoroughly ennuyees, they do not put a piquancy and flavor of sin into their pleasure, as the old West Indian toper dashes his insipid brandy with cayenne!”

Doubtless on such phenomena of the Season as these the ashes with which the priest sprinkles the heads of the penitents while he murmurs Memento, homo, quod pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris, falls like the Vesuvian dust upon Pompeiian revels, and they are buried beyond sight and hearing, for a time at least.  But we all know that ashes are a fertilizer, and by and by there blossoms above the ruins a later season which is to the earlier one what the spirit is to the body.  Everywhere outdoors, then, it is spring:  the damp and windy weather has blown away, the sky is as blue as the violets and hyacinths