new that Mrs. Haughton would that day need more than usual
forewarning of a visit from Mr. Darrell. For the evening of that day
Mrs. Haughton proposed "to give a party." When Mrs. Haughton gave a
party, it was a serious affair. A notable and bustling housewife, she
attended herself to each preparatory detail. It was to assist at this
party that Lionel had resigned Lady Dulcett's concert. The young man,
reluctantly acquiescing in the arrangements by which Alban Morley had
engaged him a lodging of his own, seldom or never let a day pass
without gratifying his mother's proud heart by an hour or two spent in
Gloucester Place, often to the forfeiture of a pleasant ride, or other
tempting excursion, with gay comrades. Difficult in London life, and at
the full of its season, to devote an hour or two to visits, apart from
the track chalked out by one's very mode of existence--difficult to
cut off an hour so as not to cut up a day. And Mrs. Haughton was
exacting-nice in her choice as to the exact slice in the day. She took
the prime of the joint. She liked her neighbours to see the handsome,
elegant young man dismount from his charger or descend from his
cabriolet, just at the witching hour when Gloucester Place was fullest.
Did he go to a levee, he must be sure to come to her before he changed
his dress, that she and Gloucester Place might admire him in uniform.
Was he going to dine at some very great house, he must take her in his
way (though no street could be more out of his way), that she might be
enabled to say in the parties to which she herself repaired "There is a
great dinner at Lord So-and-so's to-day; my son called on me before he
went there. If he had been disengaged, I should have asked permission to
bring him here."

Not that Mrs. Haughton honestly designed, nor even wished to draw the
young man from the dazzling vortex of high life into her own little
currents of dissipation. She was much too proud of Lionel to think that
her friends were grand enough for him to honour their houses by his
presence. She had in this, too, a lively recollection of her lost
Captain's doctrinal views of the great world's creed. The Captain had
flourished in the time when Impertinence, installed by Brummell, though
her influence was waning, still schooled her oligarchs, and maintained
the etiquette of her court; and even when his _misalliance_ and his
debts had cast him out of his native sphere, he lost not all the
original brightness