Who has not, at least once in their life, been to a wedding ball? Everyone can think back to his own memories and will certainly smile as he recalls all those people dressed in their Sunday best, with faces to match their conventional dress. If ever a social event proves the influence of environment, surely a wedding party does. Indeed, those who are dressed up for the day have such an effect on the others that people who are quite used to formal dress look as if they belong to a group for whom the wedding is a landmark in their lives. Then remember those solemn old men who are so indifferent to everything that they have not changed their everyday black suits; and the old married men whose faces show the sad experience of life, which the young are just beginning. And there are the pleasurable excitements of the occasion, like the bubbles of carbon dioxide in the champagne, and the envious girls, and the women taken up with the success of their wedding outfits, and the poor relations whose meagre finery is in contrast to the people in full dress rig, and the gluttons who think only of the supper, and the card-players only of playing cards. All types are there, rich and poor, the envious and the envied, the realists and the idealists, all gathered together like the flowers in a bouquet around one rare flower, the bride. A wedding ball is the world in miniature.
