Not all of the hired musicians had arrived as yet, and the household staff was still in a frenzy, with the cook shrilling that his assistants were ruining him and the footmen practically panting in their haste to get all the vases of flowers, extra chairs, dishes, and tables in their places. One young skivvy was being dosed by Nurse after her bout of hysteria brought on by the housekeeper’s berating, while her sister sufferers were dashing through the house answering all the bells that all the ladies were ringing for them.A great many ladies, of course, were involved in the furor as well. There were mamas insisting on higher or lower necklines for their defiant daughters’ frocks, and wrangling with them over the question of more or less powdering, or the advisability of a dash-on, or a wipe-off, of rouge from their hostile faces. There were maids frowning over their mistresses’ hairstyles that would not do their bidding, threaten as they would with combs and hot curling tongs, and sudden difficulties with slippers that seemed to have shrunken in their wrappings, since they were grown too tight for dancing, and discoveries of cracked fans and vanished ribbands and various other last-minute crises of fashion.The gentlemen had far less to do, of course.
