The pleasures of the town, which might be vapid and worse—tainted to more thoughtful, experienced people, were very fresh and sparkling to Lady Bell; she found a thousand things to engage and delight her at the opera, the play-houses, the Court revisited, the ridottos, the private assemblies. It was no trouble and distress, but great pleasure to her to pay visits, attend auctions, and go a-shopping three mornings out of four. It was so entire a change, though it was like native air, that she returned to it with renewed zest. She might, probably she would, tire of it after a time, but she could not tire of it very soon. And Lady Bell found it highly agreeable to be followed, besieged, even persecuted by the attentions of those men, some of them distinguished—whether for good or evil, or both, as elegant scholars, as daring travellers, as dead shots (when the game was not shy partridges or timid deer, but fellow-men, scowling in deadly enmity, pistol in hand, at twelve paces distance), as bold riders, and betters, and three-bottle men who, drunk or sober, could remain masters of the situation, and make themselves listened to in the House, and out of it, compared to the least brilliant of whom Master Charles of Nutfield was but a comely, kindly rustic and ignoramus. The great proportion of these men were little in earnest in their adulation; but Lady Bell was quite aware of the fact, and did not mind it. Her own heart was not touched; she could meet her admirers on equal terms, and like a child playing with fire, she feared no danger. She liked, though it meant next to nothing, to be besieged for her hand in a minuette or a cotillon, for the honour of serving her with tea in the box of a coffee-room after the opera or the theatre, or of handing her to Lady Sundon’s coach. She did not object to being spoken to, albeit the terms were exaggerated, of the felicity of being in her presence, and the despair of feeling her absence. She did not believe it, of course, but it was a little intoxicating at the same time. Lady Sundon, who had not enjoyed any reflected triumphs on her step-daughters’ account, was in the greatest glee at being chaperon to so favoured a young lady. Mrs. Sundon, who had been brought up to the contemplation of these triumphs, considered them quite legitimate, and viewed them as the necessary finish to the rearing of a woman of quality, and the mode by which her future was most frequently rounded off and settled.