o, which
is enough for most people; and though the accustomed soul is aware that
no desert can be more lone than London, to the unaccustomed its very
murmur sounds like a general consent of humanity to go forth and do
more than in any other circumstances. It is the constitution of the ear
which determines what it hears. For Chatty took the commotion rather the
other way. She said, "One can't hear one's self speak," and wanted to
close the windows. But Mrs. Warrender liked the very noise.

The dinner to which they were invited was in Curzon Street, in a house
which was small in reality, but made the most of every inch of its space,
and which was clothed and curtained and decorated in a manner which made
the country people open their eyes. The party was very small, their
hostess said; but it would have been a large party at the Warren, where
all the rooms were twice as big. Chatty was a little fluttered by her
first party in London; but this did not appear in her aspect, which was
always composed and simple, not demanding any one's regard, yet giving
to people who were _blase_ or tired of much attraction (as sometimes
happens) a sense of repose and relief. She must have been more excited,
however, than was at all usual with her; for though she thought she
had remarked everybody in the dim drawing-room,--where the ladies in
their pretty toilets and the men in their black coats stood about in a
perplexing manner, chiefly against the light, which made it difficult to
distinguish them, instead of sitting down all round the room, which in
the country would have seemed the natural way,--it proved that there was
one very startling exception, one individual, at least, whom she had not
remarked. She went down to dinner with a gentleman, whose name of course
she did not make out, and whose appearance, she thought, was exactly the
same as that of half the gentlemen in the procession down the narrow
staircase. Chatty, indeed, made disparaging reflections to herself as to
society in general, on this score; the thought flashing through her mind
that in the country there was more difference between even one curate
and another (usually considered the most indistinguishable class), than
between these men of Mayfair. She was a little bewildered, too, by the
appearance of the dining-room, for at that period the _diner a la Russe_
was just beginning to establish itself in England, and a thicket of
flowers upon the table was novel to Chatty, f