Ethel was thrown completely upon her aunt, and her aunt was a cypher in the world. She had not a single acquaintance in London, and was wholly inexperienced in its ways. She dragged Ethel about to see sights, and Ethel was amused for a time. The playhouses were a great source of entertainment to her, and all kinds of exhibitions, panoramas, and shows, served to fill up her day. Still the great want of all shed an air of dulness over every thing--the absence of human intercourse, and of the conversation and sympathy of her species. Ethel, as she drove through the mazy streets, and mingled with the equipages in the park, could not help thinking what pleasant people might be found among the many she saw, and how strange it was that her aunt did not speak even to one among them. This solitude, joined to a sense of exclusion, became very painful. Again and again she sighed for the Illinois; that was inhabited by human beings, humble and uncultivated as they might be. She knew their wants, and could interest herself in their goings on. All the moving crowd of men and women now around her seemed so many automata: she started when she heard them address each other, and express any feeling or intention that distinguished them from the shadows of a phantasmagoria. Where were the boasted delights of European intercourse which Lodore had vaunted?--the elegancies, and the wit, or the improvement to be derived from its society?--the men and women of talent, of refinement, and taste, who by their conversation awaken the soul to new powers, and exhilarate the spirits with a purer madness than wine--who with alternate gaiety and wisdom, humour and sagacity, amuse while they teach; accompanying their lessons with that spirit of sympathy, that speaking to the eye and ear, as well as to the mind, which books can so poorly imitate? "Here, doubtless, I should find all these," thought Ethel, as she surveyed the audience at the theatres, or the daily congregations she met in her drives; "yet I live here as if not only I inhabited a land whose language was unknown to me, for then I might converse by signs,--but as if I had fallen among beings of another species, with whom I have no affinity: I should almost say that I walked among them invisible, did they not condescend sometimes to gaze at me, proving that at least I am seen."