Nothing was wanting which money could buy--tapestries, ivories, marbles, bronzes, porcelains, potteries, orchids, palms, roses, silks, satins, and velvets, were all there in profusion. Powdered lackeys lolled in the anteroom, dignified men in black stole noiselessly over carpets soft and elastic as moss; in the tea-room the china was Sèvres of 1770, and the water boiled in what had once been a gold water-vase of Leo X.; in the delicious little oval boudoir the walls were entirely covered with old Saxe plates, and Saxe shepherds and shepherdesses made groups in all the corners, while a Watteau formed the ceiling; and yet, amidst these gay and smiling porcelain people of Meissen, who were a century and a half old, and yet kept the roses on their cheeks and the laugh on their lips, Margaret Massarene, the mistress of it all, sat in solitary state and melancholy meditation; a heavy hopelessness staring in her pale grey eyes, a dreary dejection expressed in the loose clasp of her fat hands folded on her knee, the fingers now and then beating a nervous tattoo. What use was it to have the most beautiful dwelling-house in all London if no one ever beheld its beauties from one week’s end to another? What use was it to have a regiment of polished and disdainful servants if there were no visitors of rank for them to receive? Many things are hard in this world; but nothing is harder than to be ready to prostrate yourself, and be forbidden to do it; to be ready to eat the bitter pastry which is called humble pie, and yet find no table at which so much even as this will be offered you. The great world did not affront them; it did worse, it did not seem to know they existed. “Take a big town-house; buy a big country place; ask people; the rest will all follow of itself,” had said their counsellor and confidant at the baths of Homburg. They had bought the town-house, and the country place, but as yet they had found no people to invite to either of them; and not a soul had as yet called at the magnificent mansion by Gloucester Gate, although for fifteen days and more its porter had sat behind open gates; gates of bronze and gold with the Massarene arms, which the Herald’s College had lately furnished, emblazoned above on their scroll-work awaiting the coronet which a grateful nation and a benign Sovereign would, no doubt, ere many years should have passed, add to them. People of course there were by hundreds and thousands, who would have been only too glad to be bidden to their doors; but they were people of that common clay with which the Massarenes had finished for ever and aye.