There is an aristocracy in the city, of course, and Firkins will do business with twenty persons in a day whom he could never introduce to Mrs. Firkins. The situation of that lady with respect to her society is (she will tell you in confidence) rather embarrassing. There are very many worthy persons, she will say, who represent large sums of money or great interests in trade, whom it is necessary to ask to the Lodge, but who are far from being ornamental to her new blue-satin boudoir. She has often proposed to Firkins to have them labelled in tens and thousands, according to their fortunes; that if, by any unpleasant accident, Lord Augustus should meet them there, he might respect them like = in algebra, for what they stand for. But as it is, she is really never safe in calculating on a société choisie to dine or sup. When Hook or Smith is just beginning to melt out, or Lady Priscilla is in the middle of a charade, in walks Mr. Snooks, of the foreign house of Snooks, Son, and Co.—“unexpectedly arrived from Lisbon, and run down without ceremony to call on his respectable correspondent.”
“Isn’t it tiresome?”
“Very, my dear madam! But then you have the happiness of knowing that you promote very essentially your husband’s interests, and when he has made a plum——”
“Yes, very true; and then, to be sure, Firkins has had to build papa a villa, and buy my brother Wilfred a commission, and settle an annuity on my aunt, and fit out my youngest brother Bob to India; and when I think of what he does for my family, why I don’t mind making now and then a sacrifice—but, after all, it’s a great evil not to be able to cultivate one’s own class of society.”
And so murmurs Mrs. Firkins, who is the prettiest and sweetest creature in the world, and really loves the husband she married for his fortune; but as the prosperity of Haman was nothing while Mordecai sat at the gate, it is nothing to Mrs. Firkins that her father lives in luxury, that her brothers are portioned off, and that she herself can have blue boudoirs and pony-chaises ad libitum, while Snooks, Son and Co. may at any moment break in upon the charade of Lady Priscilla!
There is a class of business people in London, mostly bachelors, who have wisely declared themselves independent of the West End, and live in a style of their own in the dark courts and alleys about the Exchange, but with a luxury not exceeded even in the silken recesses of May Fair. You will sometimes meet at the opera a young man of decided style, unexceptionable in his toilet, and quiet and gentlemanlike in his address, who contents himself with the side alley of the pit, and looks at the bright circles of beauty and fashion about him with an indifference it is difficult to explain. Make his acquaintance by chance, and he takes you home to supper in a plain chariot on the best springs Long Acre can turn out; and while you are speculating where, in the name of the Prince of Darkness, these narrow streets will bring you to, you are introduced through a small door into saloons, perfect in taste and luxury, where, ten to one, you sup with the prima donna, or la première danseuse, but certainly with the most polished persons of your own sex, not one of whom, though you may have passed a life in London, you ever met in society before. There are, I doubt not, in that vast metropolis, hundreds of small circles of society, composed thus of persons refined by travel and luxury, whose very existence in unsuspected by the fine gentleman at the West End, but who, in the science of living agreeably, are almost as well entitled to rank among the cognoscenti as Lord Sefton or the “Member for Finsbury.”
LONDON.
You return from your ramble in “the city” by two o’clock. A bright day “toward,” and the season in its palmy time. The old veterans are just creeping out upon the portico of the United Service Club, having crammed “The Times” over their late breakfast, and thus prepared their politics against surprise for the day; the broad steps of the Athenæum are as yet unthronged by the shuffling feet of the literati, whose morning is longer and more secluded than that of idler men, but who will be seen in swarms, at four, entering that superb edifice in company with the employés and politicians who affect their society. Not a cab stands yet at the “Travellers,” whose members, noble or fashionable, are probably at this hour in their dressing-gowns of brocade or shawl of the orient, smoking a hookah over Balzac’s last romance, or pursuing at this (to them) desert time of day some adventure which waited upon their love and leisure. It is early yet for the Park; but the equipages you will see by-and-by “in the ring” are standing now at Howell and James’s, and while the high-bred horses are fretting at the door, and the liveried footmen lean on their gold-headed sticks on the pavement, the fair creature whose slightest nod these trained minions and their fine-limbed animals live to obey, sits upon a three-legged stool within, and in the voice which is a spell upon all hearts, and with eyes to which rank and genius turn like Persians to the sun, discusses with a pert clerk the quality of stockings!
Look at these equipages and their appointments! Mark the exquisite balance of that claret-bodied chariot upon its springs—the fine sway of its sumptuous hammercloth in which the un-smiling coachman sits buried to the middle—the exact fit of the saddles, setting into the curve of the horse’s backs so as not to break, to the most careless eye, the fine lines which exhibit action and grace! See how they stand together—alert, fiery, yet obedient to the weight of a silken thread; and as the coachman sees you studying his turn-out, observe the imperceptible feel of the reins and the just-visible motion of his lips, conveying to the quick ears of his horses the premonitory, and, to us, inaudible sound, to which, without drawing a hair’s breadth upon the traces, they paw their fine hoofs, and expand their nostrils impatiently! Come nearer, and find a speck or a raised hair, if you can, on these glossy coats! Observe the nice fitness of the dead-black harness, the modest crest upon the panel, the delicate picking out of white in the wheels, and, if you will venture upon a freedom in manners, look in through the window of rose-teinted glass, and see the splendid cushions and the costly and splendid adaptation of the interior. The twin-mated footmen fly to the carriage-door, and the pomatumed clerk who has enjoyed a tête-à-tête for which a Prince Royal might sigh, and an Ambassador might negociate in vain, hands in his parcel. The small foot presses on the carpeted step, the airy vehicle yields lightly and recovers from the slight weight of the descending form, the coachman inclines his ear for the half-suppressed order from the footman, and off whirls the admirable structure, compact, true, steady, but magically free and fast—as if horses, footmen, and chariot were but the parts of some complicated centaur—some swift-moving monster upon legs and wheels!
Walk on a little farther to the Quadrant. Here commences the most thronged promenade in London. These crescent colonnades are the haunt of foreigners on the lookout for amusement, and of strangers in the metropolis generally. You will seldom find a town-bred man there, for he prefers haunting his clubs; or, if he is not a member of them, he avoids lounging much in the Quadrant, lest he should appear to have no other resort. You will observe a town dandy getting fidgety after his second turn in the Quadrant, while you will meet the same Frenchman there from noon till dusk, bounding his walk by those columns as if they were the bars of a cage. The western side toward Piccadilly is the thoroughfare of the honest passer-by; but under the long portico opposite, you will meet vice in every degree, and perhaps more beauty than on any other pavé in the world. It is given up to the vicious and their followers by general consent. To frequent it, or to be seen loitering there at all, is to make but one impression on the mind of those who may observe you.