That this was the fact, was a circumstance which could not escape Lady Tilney; and aware that such evidence, if it reached the public eye, would destroy at once all the sacredness of her select _coteries_, and the charms of the _société choisie_ which she was labouring to form, she determined on suppressing it, and issued orders, not to be disobeyed with impunity, for the effectual prevention of any announcement of whom the circle consisted of on the evening in question, and of its proceedings, with the exception that it excelled all other of the same date, by the possession of Sontag's inimitable powers. A mystery, which suited well with the ideas of Lady Tilney and of her friends on the subject of exclusive _ton_, would thus, she conceived, be thrown over their actions, and the rites of the supreme deity of fashion impenetrably veiled from the prying, inquisitive eye, and vulgar imitation of its pretending votaries. Humility is a duty of as especial injunction in the sacred volume, as its opposite is of strict prohibition; and let it not surprise, therefore, that Lord Albert D'Esterre, young in the world's masquerade, and imbued with feelings, which if not religiously grounded, were at least, from their purity, analogous to the moral doctrine which religion teaches, should be struck, as he perused the two paragraphs, by the apparent vanity of the one compared with the unostentatious wording of the other, and drew his inferences accordingly. "What silly pomp in Lady Borrowdale; how unworthy her rank--how positively little, thus to set forth the splendour of her entertainment, which is worth nothing when it loses the character of being a natural consequence of her station in society. What could be more brilliant than Lady Tilney's assembly; and yet there is no parade--no _catalogue raisonnée_ of all that was seen, done, or said in her drawing-rooms--how much more like a woman of real fashion." Had Lord Albert D'Esterre been acquainted with the actual truth, in all probability the opinion which he passed on this trivial circumstance, as he took his breakfast, would have been the very reverse of what it was; and, however he might hold cheap any silly ostentatious display of wealth or rank, he would certainly have been more ready to overlook Lady Borrowdale's carelessness whether her assembly was reported accurately, or not at all, than he would have been to forgive Lady Tilney's over-anxiety and ultra, _ton_ism (if such a word may be coined), to screen the names and numbers of her guests, and give celebrity to the coterie by making it a matter of secrecy and of injunction to her domestics.