Accordingly, favouring him with a bewitching smile, that a better man than he might have been proud to win, she scarcely touched the hand he held out to assist her (which he carefully dry-washed afterwards, as though the contact even of her fairy fingers had dissolved the spell of its prudish purity), and sprang lightly into the “ph_ee-a_ton.” Half an hour’s drive brought them to Flatville, where Mr. Selby, so to speak, washed his hands of them, and went on to the railroad station. Then began the shopping, that most mysterious and deeply-seated passion of the female heart--the one master vice which serves the ladies of England, instead of the turf, the wine-cup, and the gaming table, which mislead their lords. There can be little doubt who first invented shopping! The same hand which launched that arrow into the bosom of private life, gave to the child-woman, Eve, the apple that betrayed her--an apple which contained the seeds of shopping. It is such a seductive, hypocritical sin, too, this same shopping--one which is so easily dressed up to resemble a virtue--that it is almost impossible to distinguish its true character _till the bill comes in_: that, like the touch of Ithuriel’s spear, reveals the fiend in all its deformity. Every woman (that we have known) is more or less addicted to this ruinous practice, but some appear especially gifted with the fatal talent, and, if the truth must be told, our little heroine was one of these unfortunates. The amount of shopping she would contrive to get, even out of a piece of tape, was fearful to reflect upon. In the first place, it was to be of a particular (_very_ particular) texture, neither too coarse nor too fine; then society would probably be uprooted, and the Thames be set on fire, if it were a shade too wide, or, worse still, too narrow. Again, tape was useless without needles and thread, wherewith to operate upon it; and for some time--indeed, till the obsequious parrot of a shopman had gone through his whole vocabulary of persuasion, and become cynical and monosyllabic--_all_ the needles were too large; and, that difficulty being overcome, the thread (sewing cotton Emily called it) took a perverse turn, and would by no means sympathise with the eyes of the selected needles, till the harassed shopman muttered a private aspiration in regard to those useful orifices, which would have cost him five shillings in any court of justice. But he took his revenge, did that cunning shopman, for, no sooner had Emily bought all that she required, than he suddenly recovered his good humour and loquacity, and placed before her exactly the very articles she most desired, and had not funds to purchase withal, till Tantalus himself might have appeared a gentleman who lived at home at ease, in comparison with that sorely-tempted “Rose-bud.”