And Millicent saw every reason to regard her young friends as good and conscientious in most essential respects. They were extremely benevolent, and the sums of money which the family spent on philanthropic objects would have been the fortune of many people. They introduced her to Mrs. Fry, and accompanied her to that lady’s meetings with the prisoners in Newgate. They took her to sewing meetings, and book-meetings, and to many a poor abode that they visited with comfort and intelligence. The more she saw of them, the more her heart drew near to them in sympathy. They were what some classed as “Gay Friends,” but they were, notwithstanding their vast wealth and position, extremely unassuming and amiable. But gradually Millicent found the circle of her intercourse widening and extending into the regions beyond Quakerdom. She was invited with them not only to drive to the houses of the married brothers, where a much more affluent display of plate, wines, and men-servants was found, but to their aristocratic friends at the West-end, where the splendour and luxury astonished her. In these parties her young companions no longer retained a trace of the Quaker costume or language. She had observed that Edmund when going to business or to meeting, wore the collarless coat; but when he went out in an evening it was in the full dress of ordinary society. To avoid bringing their departures too prominently before the eyes of their parents, they generally dressed at the house of one of the married brothers, and there changed their dress on their return. Did Mr. and Mrs. Barrington know this? It was a point that Millicent could never clear up, but she rather imagined that they were willingly ignorant, deeming that a current was running in modern society, with which their children mixed, which it was useless to oppose. They were early people, too, like the past generation, and were in bed long before the young people returned from their evening parties. By degrees the charms of this life had produced their effect on Millicent. The scenes of luxurious affluence that she witnessed; the tables loaded with silver or silver-gilt plate,—a fortune almost in itself; the elegance of the whole array of the dinner-tables, the trains of richly-liveried servants; the waiting perfect to a movement; the after drawing-room company the music, the introduction to distinguished people, the marked notice which she herself excited, were not without their effect upon a poetical and sensitive nature like that of Millicent Heritage. She seemed to live in a new world—in a fairy land—in a dream rather than a reality, and was enchanted by it, whilst she continued to ask herself whether she ought to be so.