CHAPTER IV. Pourquoi, sur ces flots où s'élance L'espérance, Ne voit-on que le souvenir Revenir ? MERCŒUR. O fair affliction, cease! CON.-No, no, I will not, having breath to speak !— SHAKSPEARE. THE close of a London season affords to the contemplative a fertile subject for meditation; and the amount of disappointed ambitions and frustrated pretensions whirled off from the metropolis by every successive railway train, towards the close of July, would supply matter for a thousand homilies. But of all the capital town mansions where the last day of the season engenders angry emotions, either on the part of senators who, after anticipating the applauses of the 'Times,' have figured only in 'Punch,'-or beauties who, after trusting to become the belles of a royal masque, have been forced to content themselves with a fancy ball at the Hanover-square Rooms,-nowhere is the vexation so poignant as when the bill of "To be let furnished" removed from the dining-room windows in April, is to resume its place on the morrow of the family's departure. Such houses are generally the domicile of speculators of some kind or other;-families with sons or daughters to dispose of, in the unholy matrimony of barter and bargain;— or money to invest in railroads,—or insignificance to invest in fashion,-or eloquence to invest in parliament, and through parliament in a place. For one that succeeds in such projects, ninety and nine are they who, at the close of the season, are taught to measure by a house-agent's exorbitant demands for damage and breakage, the wildness of their schemes as well as the amount of their disappointment. No one better understood than Lady Hillingdon the mortification of finding, at the eleventh hour, her two daughters still unproposed for, except by those of whom, in the intoxication of her hopes concerning Lord John Howard and his cousin, she had sanctioned the rejection. But lest she should fall under any mistake as to her disappointment, Lady Ursula Wainwright took care that due condolence should enlighten her mind. "I really feel for you," my dear, said she; "though I told you from the first, if you remember, that it was certain to end so. I warned you that it was a foolish venture!" "What was a foolish venture?" retorted her ladyship. "Acceding to the desire of my son that he should have a home in London, instead of being left to the costly discomfort of an hotel?" "With every desire to see things as you wish me to see them," rejoined Lady Ursula, "I cannot suppose that you have been giving Greenwich dinners and Richmond parties, only to afford Mr Joddrell a home in which he does not spend half a dozen hours in the twenty-four! No one, my dear Lady Hillingdon, who has witnessed your solicitude to get your daughters invited here, there, and everywhere, and secure them the partners whom all the chaperons in London are disputing, could doubt that." "I will not give you the trouble to doubt or dispute about the matter," interrupted Lady Hillingdon. We have spent a very pleasant season, and there is an end of it." "Ay, if that were the end of it!"-rejoined her friend, with a significant waive of the head. "But your expenses, my dear, must have been frightful. Till Christmas, you will not half surmise all you have brought on yourself. And in the interval, what will you do with those poor girls at Brighton, with which London society has thoroughly put them out of conceit?" "I have no thoughts of returning to Brighton," said Lady Hillingdon, drily. 66 Why you have told me, a hundred times, that there is not so much as a chair or table left at Hillingdon Hall!" Lady Hillingdon remained as dumb as though she had been deaf. Her son had strictly cautioned her against being too communicative of their plans to one whose envious nature found no greater pleasure than mischief-making. "You cannot be going to the Dashwoods," argued Lady Ursula, "for it seems that the old gentleman takes Agatha's rejection of his nephew in very ill part." "Did he tell you so?" inquired her friend, changing colour,-for aware of Lord Hilling |