 You beheld her carriage in the Park, surrounded by
dandies of note. The little box in the third tier of the Opera was crowded with
heads constantly changing; but it must be confessed that the ladies held aloof
from her, and that their doors were shut to our little adventurer.
    With regard to the world of female fashion and its customs, the present
writer, of course, can only speak at second-hand. A man can no more penetrate or
understand those mysteries than he can know what the ladies talk about when they
go upstairs after dinner. It is only by inquiry and perseverance that one
sometimes gets hints of those secrets; and by a similar diligence every person
who treads the Pall Mall pavement, and frequents the clubs of this metropolis,
knows, either through his own experience or through some acquaintance with whom
he plays at billiards or shares the joint, something about the genteel world of
London, and how, as there are men (such as Rawdon Crawley, whose position we
mentioned before) who cut a good figure to the eyes of the ignorant world and to
the apprentices in the Park, who behold them consorting with the most notorious
dandies there, so there are ladies, who may be called men's women, being
welcomed entirely by all the gentlemen, and cut or slighted by all their wives.
Mrs. Firebrace is of this sort - the lady with the beautiful fair ringlets whom
you see every day in Hyde Park, surrounded by the greatest and most famous
dandies of this empire. Mrs. Rockwood is another, whose parties are announced
laboriously in the fashionable newspapers, and with whom you see that all sorts
of ambassadors and great noblemen dine; and many more might be mentioned had
they to do with the history at present in hand. But while simple folks who are
out of the world, or country people with a taste for the genteel, behold these
ladies in their seeming glory in public places, or envy them from afar off,
persons who are better instructed could inform them that these envied ladies
have no more chance of establishing themselves in »Society« than the benighted
squire's wife in Somersetshire who reads of their doings in The Morning Post.
Men living about London are aware of these awful truths. You hear how pitilessly
many ladies of seeming rank and wealth are excluded from this »Society.« The
frantic efforts which they make to enter this circle, the meannesses to which
they submit, the insults which they undergo, are matters of wonder to those who
take human or woman kind for a study; and the pursuit of fashion under
difficulties
