As Fitzhenry’s wife, she first attracted attention; and, with pleasing manners, rank, riches, youth, and beauty at once to recommend her, she was soon sought for, admired, and courted; and had she been willing to take advantage of the universal cry in her favour, Emmeline might, with little or no trouble on her part, have been raised to that envied distinction, obtained no one knows how, or why, of being the _fashion_. For the world is so capricious and wayward in its preferences, that it often greets beings like Lady Fitzhenry (from circumstances regardless of its favour) with those winning, gracious smiles, which it perversely withholds from others most indefatigable in their efforts to obtain them. Witness the anxious and fatiguing labours of so many candidates for its patronage, their eternal struggles to grasp at what constantly escapes them, if for a moment they pause to take breath, or relax the little hold they have secured. When individuals are blamed for either too much or too little love of the world, the different welcome it bestows seems little considered. How little does the situation of a courted, fashionable girl, surrounded by partners and admirers, and thus at liberty to give herself every impertinent air, which a vain mind, and a selfish, unfeeling heart dictate, resemble that of the unobserved, disregarded being, who, night after night, follows some elderly, undistinguished _chaperon_ through the regular round of London amusements, and, seated by her hour after hour in dull neglect, seems at last to become a part of the bench she rests on, till reduced, perhaps, to be even envious of its insensibility; yet the same enlivening music plays to both; the same bright lights are cast on both, and the same glittering, buzzing crowd surrounds them; but question them, after their night’s dissipation, as to the entertainment at which they were both present, and how different will be their accounts of the same scene—of what is called the gay world! of all worlds the most melancholy to those who are not gay.