Nike Shox Torch 2 They wandered delightedly from one subject to another

They wandered delightedly from one subject to another, and toward the end of dinner the conversation touched on the supernatural. “Do you believe in ghosts?” the young lady asked. “No,” said he with a laugh; “do you?” “I am one,” she replied — and suddenly the seat she had occupied was empty. After dinner his hostess apologized for putting him next to an empty chair. “We expected my dear friend, Mrs. —— ; but just as you arrived we had a telegram announcing her sudden death — and there was not even time to take away her seat.”
The regular afternoon diversion at Newport was a drive. Every day all the elderly ladies, leaning back in victoria or barouche, or the new-fangled vis-a-vis, a four-seated carriage with a rumble for the footman, drove down the whole length of Bellevue Avenue, where the most fashionable villas then stood, and around the newly laid-out “Ocean Drive,” which skirted for several miles the wild rocky region between Narragansett bay and the Atlantic. For this drive it was customary to dress as elegantly as for a race-meeting at Auteuil or Ascot. A brocaded or satin-striped dress, powerfully whale-boned, a small flower-trimmed bonnet tied with a large tulle bow under the chin, a dotted tulle veil and a fringed silk or velvet sunshade, sometimes with a jointed handle of elaborately carved ivory, composed what was thought a suitable toilet for this daily circuit between wilderness and waves.
If these occupations seem to us insufficient to fill a day, it must be remembered that the onerous and endless business of “calling” took up every spare hour. I can hardly picture a lady of my mother’s generation without her card-case in her hand. Calling was then a formidable affair, since many ladies had weekly “days” from which there was no possible escape, and others cultivated an exasperating habit of being at home on the very afternoon when, according to every reasonable calculation, one might have expected them to be at Polo, or at Mrs. Belmont’s archery party, or abroad on their own sempiternal card-leaving. By the time I grew up the younger married women had emancipated themselves, and simply drove from house to house depositing their cards, duly turned down in the upper left-hand corner, to the indignation of stay-a-home hostesses, many of whom made their servants keep a list of the callers who “did not ask,” so that these might be struck off the next season’s invitation list — a punishment borne by the young and gay with perfect equanimity, as it was only the dull hostesses who inflicted it.
In my mother’s day, however, there were no palliatives to calling. The footman had to ask if Mrs. So-and-so was at home, and if she was, there ensued a half hour’s visit in a cool shaded drawing-room, or on a wide verandah overlooking the sea. As this had to be repeated after every lunch, dinner or ball, and even the young men were not exempt (though they usually got a mother or sister to leave their cards for them), it may be imagined how much those daughters of Danaus, the dowagers leaning back in their victorias, needed the refreshment of a “turn” around the Ocean Drive in the intervals of their unending labour.