By April, London was beginning to look a little more propitious, although the crush-room was not as interesting as it would be when the season was commenced; the assemblies had sufficient people to cause some general inconvenience, but the joy of not having room to stir, walk, or dance with safety was to be denied until June. When there is plenty of elbow-room from the thinness of the company, there is nothing to be said for the evening; when there is no time for conversation, everybody is fancied agreeable; and in fashionable life, the retailing of any evening to the unfortunate absentees is vastly superior to the actual event, whether chiefly consisting of complaints or commendation. Scandal is as thin as the crowd, and such insubstantial gossip as, “It was no such thing, I can assure you; for a particular friend of mine, who is extremely intimate with the nephew of a particular acquaintance of a friend of Mr. Jackson’s, whose son is continually amongst that set who know everyone of any importance in the Kingdom, confidently assured me, from the most undoubted authority, Sir, that her father was a country attorney, and she had run away with a dancing-master.”

During May, enough people had found their way back to London to make it tolerably gay at last. There were fine mornings to take a walk in the Park, where a few fair equestriennes mingled amongst the gentlemen on Rotten Row; others, stopt along Ladies’ Mile, were busy in desultory conversation, or being witty and impertinent as required. The fashionable city assemblies, opera, theatres, routs, or what passed for pleasure in that place in that season had returned to their comfortable over-crowding, those in the mob either participating or observing an hundred little comedies, melodramas, and schemes. There is always a daughter waiting for the unapproved suitor, followed by an anxious parent; a less-anxious husband seeking to discover the trail of an inconstant wife; the impatient declaration of a successful match, with the hint in the loudest tones that “nothing is to be announced just at present”; the open flirtation in this place; weariness and “Please, let us go home now, Mamma!” in another.