There are the loungers flocking around their friends or walking up and down in the hope of admiration.  And they get it too, for who could help admiring such master-pieces of a tailor’s skill?  Are these really the descendants of that Adam whose posterity had all to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow?  These automatons, whose only business in life seems to be to look after pretty women and themselves?  Men are supposed to be bread winners, but they have a very easy time of it, I think, though they generally try to make themselves out so overworked.  Go into that great centre of business, the City, and you find everyone of these busy men out and about, always apparently in a great hurry, never seeming to arrive at any destination, running about and hustling each other, occasionally meeting an acquaintance, which proves a good opportunity for one to stand the other a “drink.”  A funny way men have of showing their affection, have they not?  “Ah! how de do, old fellow?  Come and have a drink,” is their invariable salutation to an intimate friend.  After all it is better than the mutual kissing on the part of women, which is the more emphatic the more they dislike one another.  Men are less demonstrative and therefore more sincere in their friendships.  Anyhow there cannot be many at work in their offices, or where could this idle crowd come from?

In spite of their haste, though, they generally find time to stare at any woman who crosses their path.  Why should not a woman go to the City?  She has as much right there as man, and yet if she is in the least degree superior to the flower girls (?) who surround the Royal Exchange, she is looked on as a freak of nature, a positive curiosity, and is followed by every pair of male eyes within reach!

Mrs. Grundy is inclined to rather overdo her season, I think.  There is so much she might leave undone, so many things that “never would be missed.”  Imagine the gratitude that would be displayed to anyone who would put down and demolish those dreadful crushes, so called “at homes,” where nobody ever is at home; where you have neither space nor air from the moment you arrive until the glad time comes for departing.  Does anyone enjoy them, I wonder!  Does anybody like being literally baked with heat, which I am sure must exceed even that at Mexico; where one of the inhabitants of that delightful climate, when he died and went to perdition, found the contrast so striking that he was obliged to send home for his greatcoat!

Still, I suppose such entertainments will continue to exist.  They are a good deal cheaper than balls or dinners, and you can “knock off” ever so many people at the same time.

It is well, at any rate, to consider economy in some matters in these wofully extravagant days.  When the shops are decked out in their gayest colors to lure us on to destruction, why is it that “just the very thing you want” is placed so conspicuously in the front of the window, put cunningly near a mirror too, so that you see it all the way round, and it appears doubly precious?