And yet here he was, if one could credit one's senses, about to take part in a fancy-dress ball, a form of entertainment notoriously a testing experience for the toughest.

And he was attending that fancy-dress ball, mark younot, like every other well-bred Englishman, as a Pierrot, but as Mephistophelesthis involving, as I need scarcely stress, not only scarlet tights but a pretty frightful false beard.

"Well, anyway," I said, "coming down to hard facts and cutting out all this visionary stuff about vibrating tails and what not, the salient point that emerges is that you are booked to appear at a fancy-dress ball.

And I tell you out of my riper knowledge of fancy-dress balls, Gussie, that you won't enjoy yourself.

All you have done is to subject Mr. Fink-Nottle to the nameless horrors of a fancy-dress ball for nothing.

How did he make out at the fancy-dress ball?"

"He did not arrive at the fancy-dress ball, sir.

We shot Gussie into a cab and he started forth, headed for wherever this fancy-dress ball was.

He dresses you up in scarlet tights and one of the foulest false beards of my experience, and sends you off to fancy-dress balls.

You attempted to push him over the line by rigging him out in a Mephistopheles costume and sending him off to a fancy-dress ball, your view being that scarlet tights would embolden him.

A man who can set out in a cab for a fancy-dress ball and not get there is manifestly a poop of no common order.

I don't think I have ever known anybody else who was such a dashed silly ass that he couldn't even get to a fancy-dress ball.

There is a fancy-dress ball to-night at Government House, and that is the last of my dissipations for some time to come.

Lecoq knew, through Nina Gipsy, who still filled the part of lady's-maid in the Fauvel family, that M. Fauvel had insisted on his wife accompanying him on the following evening to a great fancy-dress ball which was to be given by one of the wealthiest families in the capital.

Her brother of six or seven looks as if he were going to a fancy-dress ball in the character of His Highness the Holkar.

"'Trust me,' I answers with dignity; 'I've won diplomas as a fancy-dress architect.'

The enterprise resolves itself into one somewhat similar to the enterprise of a rich friend of mine who went to a fancy-dress ball dressed up as a gentleman.

Sudbury cannot be Eatanswill, because there was a fancy-dress shop at Eatanswill, and there is no record of a fancy-dress shop at Sudbury.

But I rather guess that the fancy-dress-ball era is just about over.

It was merely a resident going to a fancy-dress dance.

And the Division goes forth as it were masked, disguised, just like one of Mr. LE QUEUX'S diplomatist heroes at a fancy-dress ball, wearing a domino.

Indeed, the ladies there did not meet her so often on their own ground for some time, and were principally disturbed by reports of her doings at Bonchamp, where she played at cricket, and at hockey, gave a course of lectures on physiology, presided at a fancy-dress bazaar for the schools as Lady Jane Grey, and was on two or three committees.

Why should not we all be in fancy-dress to-night?

My companion wore a smart tailor gown, and I was got up as if for a fancy-dress ball, but in the streets of Constantinople no one gave me a second glance.

But if this cannot be, it will be no substitute or satisfaction to turn life into an interminable historical fancy-dress ball.