Proceeding down a passage, they pushed open a door with a painted ground-glass window, and entered a spacious supper-room.
This apartment was lofty, handsomely fitted up, well furnished, and provided with boxes containing little tables, like the coffee-room of an hotel.
A cheerful fire burnt in the grate, and the numerous lights suspended around the apartment were reflected in a handsome mirror over the mantel-piece.
Above the door leading into the room was a species of gallery, forming a grotto-like opening into a suite of upper apartments, which were reached by a flight of stairs leading from the passage just now mentioned.
All was gaiety and bustle both in the coffee-room below and the chambers above. Numerous suppers were in progress, the partakers thereof consisting of gentlemen of various descriptions and gay ladies of only one particular class. Oysters, lobsters, cold fowls, ham, and kidneys, constituted the principal edibles; while liquor flowed copiously and in all gradations of luxury, from humble porter in pewter pots to sparkling champagne in green bottles.
The male portion of the guests was composed of those various specimens of "gentlemen" who either turn night into day, or who make up for the toils of the day by the dissipated enjoyments of the night.
There was an attorney's clerk, who, having picked up a stray guinea in a manner for which he would not perhaps have liked to account, was doing the liberal, in the shape of oysters, stout, and hot brandy-and-water, to some fair Cyprian whom he had never seen before, and whom he would perhaps never see again, but with whom he was on the very best possible terms for the time being; the only trifling damper to his enjoyment being her constant anxiety lest "her friend" should happen to come in and catch her at supper with the said attorney's clerk.
There was a notorious black-leg, who was regaling a couple of frail ones with champagne and looking out for flats as well; while his accomplice was doing precisely the same in the next box,—both these respectable gentlemen affecting to be total strangers to each other.
There also was a handsome young man, who, having just come of age, and stepped into the possession of a good property, was commencing his career of waste and extravagance at the Paradise. Proud of the nauseating flattery of the three or four abandoned women who had him in tow, he was literally throwing about his money in all directions, and staring around him with the vacant air of semi-intoxication, as much as to say, "Don't you think me a very fine dashing fellow indeed?"
In another box was an old man, who had reached the wrong side of sixty, but who was endeavouring to make a young girl of seventeen believe that he was but forty-four last birth-day,—a tale which she had too much tact to appear to doubt for a moment, as the antiquated beau supplied her with copious draughts of champagne to enable her to swallow the lie the more easily.