The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 159: what you’re looking at

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

136 REYNOLDS’ WORKS on the sofa, near the embroidery, lay three or four volumes containing the works of the best British poets, and these were in a comparatively common binding. The dress of the young lady herself was simple and neat, in the best possible taste, and therefore in reality characterized with a more real elegance than if it had been of the magnificent style which one would have expected to discern on the part of a female occupant of that sumptuously furnished room. Need we say that it was the refined taste of this lady to which a visitor would feel himself indebted for those little evidences of superior and more intellectual judgment which, few though they were, nevertheless afforded a certain relief to the eye and to the mind, otherwise dazzled and satiated by the presence of all that ostentatious display of wealth? The lady of whom we are speaking was Zoe, Mr. Armytage’s daughter, and the house to which we have introduced the reader was Mr. Armytage’s mansion. All the rooms in that house — save two — were furnished with a costliness corre- sponding to that of the principal apartment; thousands and thousands of pounds must have been lavished in fitting up this gorgeous dwelling. But everywhere throughout the mansion, with the exception of the two rooms to which we have alluded, there was the pervasive indication of the vulgar mind of a parvenu, who, aspiring to move in the best and most brilliant society, fancied that his own plebeian origin and upstart position would be lost sight of in the dazzling splendours by which he was surrounded. The two rooms which formed an exception to the rule were the private apartments of Zoe Armytage herself: namely, her boudoir and her bedchamber. Those she had caused to be fitted up in conformance with her own refined taste, and the simple elegance which characterized these rooms afforded a sufh- cient proof of what the entire mansion would have been if the same genius had superintended all its appointments. But now, between three and four o’clock on a certain after- noon, we find Miss Armytage seated in the drawing-room, from the simple fact that this was the visiting hour when ‘‘ morning calls’? might be expected, for in the fashionable world it is always morning until dinner-time, even though the dinner hour be postponed until seven o’clock in the evening. Zoe, however, could not endure the magnificence of that apartment unless it were relieved by the presence ECORNICLIOO KES (E(0)