"And it is for this, my dear Mrs Bodwinkle," I thought, "that you have given up your villa at Clapham, and the friends that respectfully worshipped at the Bodwinkle shrine, who gazed upon you with reverend upturned eyes, instead of irreverent upturned noses, like the present company! Do you think, when you have blazed for a moment and gone out like a blue-light, that you will know how to find your way in the dark back to Clapham, or that you will be able to collect your old congregation? Will not new Bodwinkles have arisen above the suburban horizon, or will the departed glories of your rapid but bright passage across the firmament of fashion always secure you an audience who will gladly listen to your wonderful experiences in the great world, to whom you will recount the devotion manifested towards you by certain noblemen, and the slights you received at the hands of certain noblewomen, and who will stare when you describe the Broadhem-Spiffy combination which sent you up like a rocket, and the sudden collapse of that combination which will assuredly bring you down like a stick? Never mind, Mrs B.; whatever happens, nothing short of a fire can deprive you of the basket of fashionable cards which will be left upon you during the season, and which, carefully treasured with your dinner _menus_, will be a lasting evidence of the reality of that social triumph which might otherwise seem like the 'baseless fabric of a dream.'" And this consideration reminds me that I possess middle-class readers, who may positively doubt the truth of the picture which I am endeavouring to give them of the society in which Mrs Bodwinkle now found herself. They will not have the advantage of hearing from the lips of that good lady these wonderful traits of the manners and customs of this, to them, mysterious class. And therefore they will fail to see any particular merit in what they may suppose to be merely a flippant delineation of a purely ideal state of society. My dear readers, I should be no more competent to invent a state of society so eccentric in its habits and constitution as this of London cream, than I should be to write an account of lion-hunting like the late lamented Jules Gerard. That was a real strain upon the imaginative and constructive faculties; I aspire to no such talent, but simply contemplate hyperbolically a certain phase of contemporary civilisation. If, by way of a little pastime, I put Mayfair into a fancy dress, it only appears in its true colours and becomes fancy-fair, with a great deal of show and very little substance; so I dress it up as it pleases me, but I invent nothing. I confine myself strictly to the stage properties. You in the pit or gallery may be too far off to see, but I assure you I have avoided anything beyond the exaggeration permissible in a caricature. As I know your imitative faculties, dear middle classes, I can conscientiously assure you that you may take 'Piccadilly' as a guide