The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 158: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XI ZOE In a sumptuously furnished drawing-room, in a house belonging to one of the handsomest terraces in the Regent’s Park, a lady was seated. The apartment itself was charac- terized with splendour more than with elegance; every detail of its appointments was rich and costly, so that the evidences of wealth were assembled together with a profusion more calculated for ostentatious display than con- sistent with refined taste. The walls were crowded with vast mirrors; the style of the furniture was of scarlet and gold; knickknacks which had cost vast sums were scattered about as ornamental trifles. The room, though spacious, was in point of fact encumbered with its own magnificence, and thus was it divested of that real air of comfort which good taste knows so skilfully how to blend with the dazzling effects of splendour. Yet amidst all these objects of a grand and gorgeous luxury which were so overwhelmingly heaped together in this drawing-room, there were a few slight evidences of a more correct and refined intellect than that which had presided over the general appointments of the apartment. There were flowers tastefully arranged with a view to the harmonizing of their brilliant colours; music rested upon an open piano, and lay upon a stool near a harp. There was a portfolio upon one of the centre-tables, and this contained several beautiful specimens of drawing, alike in pencil and in water-colour. An elegant piece of embroidery-work, half-finished, lay on the sofa on which sat the fair occupant of thisroom. The books which were formally arranged upon the tables for mere purposes of show were as trumpery in their contents as they were gorgeous in their binding, but 135 Com (©) LOOKS (E(0)