Then there was shopping. There are a good many shops in Regent Street, and those that are not there are in Bond Street, at least a fair sprinkling of them; but Harry solemnly declared (_after_ his marriage) that during the fortnight the party were in London, they went into them _all_, and every man knows what _that_ involves. Give a woman her head, so far as to allow her to put it into a shop, and he must indeed be a clever fellow who can coax or coerce her out of it under half-an-hour. But Harry was in love, and love is blind (though it has an awkward trick of recovering its eyesight after marriage and making up for lost time, by spying out all kinds of things to which it had far better had remained blind); besides, Alice was not more _exigeante_ than a lover generally desires his mistress should be: too much independence of character in a young girl being by no means an attractive quality. Then there was a good deal of sight-seeing to be got through. Emily had never been in London before, and Alice only once for a week. So they “did” Westminster Abbey, which they really enjoyed; and St. Paul’s, which they pretended to admire, and didn’t; and the Tower, where Emily called the figures in the horse-armoury a set of quizzical old things; and the Polytechnic, where they saw a man go down in a diving-bell, to pick up nothing at the bottom of a large wash-hand-basin, and come up again half suffocated, which they considered curious and highly satisfactory, as no doubt it was to everybody but that unfortunate martyr to popular science himself, who (taking the most cheerful view of his amphibious occupation) can scarcely be regarded in the light of a jolly young waterman. Then they went to the National Gallery to see the pictures, which, as it was not an unusually bright and clear day, of course they were unable to do; but they had the pleasure of seeing the building itself, and the fountains in Trafalgar Square, which they all agreed they had never beheld anything like before; and Harry added, that in his travels he had not met with anything to equal the whole affair in its peculiar style, and that he thought foreigners must be very strongly impressed by it, and that it must at once give them a clear idea of English taste; which remarks it was a pity the architect was not there to hear, as they might possibly have been of use to him. Emily had never beheld a play, so they went to the I-see-um Theatre, where they witnessed the performance of a very long melodrama, adapted from the French (that is, all that was national and peculiar--without which the plot became a mere silly tissue of improbable events and impossible situations--omitted, and the place supplied by worn-out and conventional clap-traps). This _pièce de résistance_, which was to last the play-going public for some four or six months, according to the degree in which it suited their appetites, was so well put on the stage, and so