I went: turned my uncle’s one-horse chaise into the long old avenue about an hour after the time specified, and perceived by the lights flashing from all the windows, and the crash of chairs and carriages returning from the door, that the room was most punctually full, and the performers most pastorally impatient. The first face I encountered on my entrance was that of my old friend Villars; I was delighted to meet him, and expressed my astonishment at finding him in a situation for which his inclination, one would have supposed, was so little adapted. “By Mercury,” he exclaimed, “I am metamorphosed--fairly metamorphosed, my good Vyvyan; I have been detained here three months by a fall from Sir Peter, and have amused myself most indefatigably by humming tunes and reading newspapers, winding silk and guessing conundrums. I have made myself the admiration, the adoration, the very worship of all the coteries in the place; am reckoned very clever at cross purposes, and very apt at ‘What’s my thought like?’ The squires have discovered I can carve, and the matrons hold me indispensable at loo. Come! I am of little service to-night, but my popularity may be of use to you. You don’t know a soul! I thought so--read it in your face the moment you came in. Never saw such a---- There, Vyvyan, look there! I will introduce you.” And so saying my companion half limped, half danced with me up to Miss Amelia Mesnil, and presented me in due form. When I look back to any particular scene of my existence, I can never keep the stage clear of second-rate characters. I never think of Mr. Kean’s Othello without an intrusive reflection upon the subject of Mr. Cooper’s Cassio; I never call to mind a gorgeous scattering forth of roses from Mr. Canning, without a painful idea of some contemporary effusion of poppies from Mr. Hume. And thus, beautiful Margaret, it is in vain that I endeavour to separate your fascination from the group which was collected around you. Perhaps that dominion, which at this moment I feel almost revived, recurs more vividly to my imagination, when the forms and figures of all by whom it was contested are associated in its renewal. First comes Amelia the magnificent, the acknowledged belle of the county, very stiff and very dumb in her unheeded and uncontested supremacy; and next, the most black-browed of fox-hunters, Augusta, enumerating the names of her father’s stud, and dancing as if she imitated them; and then the most accomplished Jane, vowing that for the last month she had endured immense _ennui_, that she thinks Lady Olivia prodigiously _fade_, that her cousin Sophy is quite _brillante_ to-night, and that Mr. Peters plays the violin _à merveille_. “I am bored, my dear Villars--positively bored! The light is bad and the music abominable; there is no spring in the boards and less in the conversation; it is a lovely moonlight night, and there is nothing worth looking at in the room.”