For people who are well off, not to say rich, and who have no prevailing anxieties to embitter their life, and who take an interest in what is going on around them, London is a pleasant place enough, even in December. And still more is Park Lane a pleasant place. To see the red wintry sunshine lighting up the misty expanse of the Park, the brisk pedestrians going to and fro under the bare trees, the carriages following each other along the broad road, the coveys of pretty children and neat nursemaids, and all the flood of prosperous life that flows along, leisurely in the morning, crowding in the afternoons, is very pleasant to the uninitiated. All the notable people that are to be found in London at that period, appearing now and then, and a great many people who get lost to sight in the throngs of the season, but are more worth seeing than even those throngs, were pointed out to the ladies by the two cicerones who took in hand to enlighten their ignorance. The house they had was one of those small houses with large, ample, bow windows to the drawing-rooms, which give a sort of rustic, irregular simplicity to this street of the rich. Those people who are happy and well off and live in Park Lane must be happier and more well off than people anywhere else. They must be amused besides, which is no small addition to happiness. Even Anne felt that to sit at that window all day long would be a pleasant way of occupying a day. The misty distance, penetrated by the red rays of sunshine, was a kind of poem, relieved by the active novelty of the animated foreground, the busy passengers, the flood and high tide of life. How different from the prospect over the park at Mount, where Charley Ashley on the road, coming up from the Rectory, was something to look at, and an occasional friend with him the height of excitement. The red rays made the mist brighter and brighter; the crowd increased; the carriages went faster; and then the sun waned and got low and went out in a bank of cloud, and the lamps were all lighted in the misty twilight, but still the crowd went on. The ladies sat at the window and were amused, as by a scene in a play; and then to think that ‘all the pictures,’ by which Anne meant the National Gallery, were within reach--and many another wonder, of which they had been able to snatch a hasty glance once a year, or not so often as once a year, but which was now daily at their hand: and even, last, but yet important, the shops behind all, in which everything that was interesting was to be found. Rose and her mother used to like, when they had nothing better and more important to buy, to go to the Japanese shop, and turn over the quaint articles there. Everything was new to them, as if they had come from the South Seas. But the newest of all was this power of doing something whenever they pleased, finding something to look at, something to hear, something to buy. The power of shopping is in itself an endless delight to country ladies.