How unlike the mansion where you paid taxes
and distributed elegant hospitality for so many years!
You subside into lodgings, I say, and you find yourself very tolerably
comfortable. I am not sure that in her heart your wife is not happier
than in what she calls her happy days. She will be somebody hereafter:
she was nobody in Harley Street: that is, everybody else in her
visiting-book, take the names all round, was as good as she. They had the
very same entrees, plated ware, men to wait, etc., at all the houses
where you visited in the street. Your candlesticks might be handsomer
(and indeed they had a very fine effect upon the dinner-table), but then
Mr. Jones's silver (or electro-plated) dishes were much finer. You had
more carriages at your door on the evening of your delightful soirees
than Mrs. Brown (there is no phrase more elegant, and to my taste, than
that in which people are described as "seeing a great deal of carriage
company"); but yet Mrs. Brown, from the circumstance of her being a
baronet's niece, took precedence of your dear wife at most tables.
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