The Swan Girls' Christmas Ball
My head is whirling. I just got back from the Christmas ball given by the strange twins at my dancing class. Maude and Agnes. Two girls fainted from their tight corsets and were dragged, quite roughly, to a small ante-room called a fainting room to recover on sofas, where their mamas fanned them and pushed them back out again to lose no time in attracting the men, even though they could barely breathe.
You have to have an eighteen inch waist to even be in the race to find a husband.
For supper, mid way through the dancing ,there were little birds jellied in aspic, towering blancmanges in rose and lavender, iced cakes ringed with Christmas roses and icicle shaped biscuits, cups of syllabubs and frosted bottles of champagne. Port-faced men forked mounds of roast beef and savouries onto their plates.
The girls in corsets could eat nothing at all. They sipped peach sorbets stoically from tiny iced spoons and eyed each other warily, worried they hadn’t many hours left in which to shine…
Please please may the Marchmont chest give me the freedom to escape all this.
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