Rose, Blanche, and Violet, Volume I by George Henry Lewes

"Oh! about gaieties, I assure you I have little to tell. We go to very few parties. Mama says dancing is so frivolous: though I observe she dances all the evening when we do by chance go to a ball. Papa sides with her, and says _he_ cannot conceive what pleasure people take in it. Perhaps not; but we can! However, we dare not complain, and mama is so kind to us that, on the whole, we get on very well, though I long to be in the country. Last Saturday week, we were invited to Dr. Whiston's; a wise place where every one looks like an oracle, where there are few young men, and those generally sickly, fewer nice men, and scarcely any one Blanche and I know to speak to. Mama likes these sort of places. She is so clever, and manages to talk with all the oracles upon their separate sciences, though she never opens a scientific book from one month to another; but somehow she can dispense with knowledge, and yet contrive that people should believe her deeply-read. But then she is so strange! I must interrupt my narrative to tell you something which I can't make out in her. She gets more admiration, in spite of her deformity, than we could ever pretend to; and her style of beauty seems to be exactly what men delight in.

"How she manages to persuade us, I don't know, but the result is, we never look well when we go out to a party. This, and our not being overwise, prevents our finding much enjoyment at Dr. Whiston's; so we went on that memorable evening prepared for a yawn. Mama quickly got us seats, and then sailed about the room talking to her friends. This she does invariably. It is called chaperoning. Though what protection young girls need at such places, and how this can be considered as protection, are two things I have not yet comprehended. Well, I seem as if I were never coming to the point, eh? And yet all this preparation is to usher in no adorably handsome young man with bushy whiskers and sleepy eyes, like him we used to see at church when we were at Mrs. Wirrelston's, and when you persuaded me I was in love with that little humpbacked lawyer, in nankeens, who used to ogle us so (do you remember? ) -- but, on the contrary, to tell you my evening was rendered perfectly delightful by a certain Julius St. John, who sat by my side and chatted away so pleasantly, that my evening fled as rapidly as Cinderella's. And it was his conversation -- nothing else; for I declare he was unreasonably hideous.