On arriving in Eton Square, and asking for Mr Avenel, Randal was at once ushered into the drawing-room. The apartment was not in such good solid mercantile taste as had characterised Avenel's more humble bachelor's residence at Screwstown. The taste now was the Honourable Mrs Avenel's; and, truth to say, no taste could be worse. Furniture of all epochs heterogeneously clumped together;--here a sofa _à la renaissance_ in _Gobelin_--there a rosewood Console from Gillow--a tall mock-Elizabethan chair in black oak, by the side of a modern Florentine table of mosaic marbles. All kinds of colours in the room, and all at war with each other. Very bad copies of the best-known pictures in the world, in the most gaudy frames, and impudently labelled by the names of their murdered originals--"Raffaele," "Corregio," "Titian," "Sebastian del Piombo." Nevertheless, there had been plenty of money spent, and there was plenty to show for it. Mrs Avenel was seated on her sofa _à la renaissance_, with one of her children at her feet, who was employed in reading a new Annual in crimson silk binding. Mrs Avenel was in an attitude as if sitting for her portrait. Polite society is most capricious in its adoptions or rejections. You see many a very vulgar person firmly established in the _beau monde_; others, with very good pretensions as to birth, fortune, &c., either rigorously excluded, or only permitted a peep over the pales. The Honourable Mrs Avenel belonged to families unquestionably noble, both by her own descent and by her first marriage; and if poverty had kept her down in her earlier career, she now, at least, did not want wealth to back her pretensions. Nevertheless, all the dispensers of fashion concurred in refusing their support to the Honourable Mrs Avenel. One might suppose it was solely on account of her plebeian husband; but indeed it was not so. Many a woman of high family can marry a low-born man not so presentable as Avenel, and, by the help of his money, get the fine world at her feet. But Mrs Avenel had not that art. She was still a very handsome, showy woman; and as for dress, no duchess could be more extravagant. Yet these very circumstances had perhaps gone against her ambition; for your quiet little plain woman, provoking no envy, slips into the _coteries_, when a handsome, flaunting lady--whom, once seen in your drawing-room, can be no more overlooked than a scarlet poppy amidst a violet bed--is pretty sure to be weeded out as ruthlessly as a poppy would be in a similar position.