For as long as either of the de Bourgh ladies could remember, the contest for the weekly allotment of tickets to the Wednesday balls at Almack’s had produced a rivalry for the vouchers, blinding the haut ton and its legion pretenders with splendour and fear—in defiance of all reason—and certainly in opposition to any serious notion of salvation in the future. This judiciary decided the success or failure of all London society, and had done so by blatantly disregarding all claims to superior pretentions and interest; indeed the Ladies Patronesses declined to admit their own mothers and sisters for the inexplicable (and unexplained) epithet of mauvais ton. Instead, all favours were granted by those demigods to those supplicants as had evinced that this most desirable of spheres might retain its incomparable lustre, only if burnished by their own singular surfeits of personal merit, beauty, high fashion, graceful dancing, or exceptional wit—in short, by that ineffable blessing of ton. Every gentleman was required to dance for his tickets, or to remain within that temple of pre-eminence every moment in dread of eternal banishment, in favour of a more animated replacement. Young ladies without partners sat in uncomfortable chairs, in solitary mortification and pretended happiness for their luckier sisters, but could not obtain more than one evening of such desirable misery. Lovers, of all people, were to be refused: pale cheeks, sunken, black eyes, and an unhealthy thinness of form were indicative of an hopeless state of either consumption or love, and so to be rejected immediately as unsightly and—as lovers are proverbially stupid but to each other—unfashionable.