Sons of Fire, Volume I by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

A small dance in a bright airy country house on a balmy summer evening is about as pleasant a form of entertainment as can be offered to the youthful mind not satiated by metropolitan entertainments, by balls in Park Lane, where the flowers alone cost the price of an elderly spinster's annuity, Bachelors' balls, and Guards' balls, American balls in Carlton Gardens, patrician balls in grand old London houses, built in the days when rank was as much apart from the herd and the newly rich as royalty; when rank and royalty moved hand-in-hand on a plateau of privilege and splendour as high above the commonality as Madrid is above the sea.

Matcham, which gave itself the airs common to all village communities, pretended to make very light of Mrs. Mornington's dance; a summer dance, when everybody worth meeting was, or ought to be, in London. Happily for Mrs. Mornington, the inhabitants of Matcham were a stay-at-home race -- who had neither money nor enterprise for much gadding. To go to Swanage or Budleigh Salterton for a month or so while the leaves were falling was the boldest flight that Matcham people cared about.