Read "The Venetians" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
December's fogs covered London as with a funeral pall, and hansom and four-wheeler crept along the curb more slowly than a funeral procession. It was the winter season, the season of cattle-shows, and theatres, and middle-class suburban gaieties, and snug little dinners and luncheons in the smart world, casual meetings of birds of passage, halting for a few days between one country visit and another, or preparing for migration to sunnier skies. There were just people enough in Mayfair to make London pleasant; and there were people enough in South Kensington and Tyburnia to fill the favourite theatres to overflowing.
A new comic opera had been produced at the Apollo at the beginning of the month, and a new singer had taken the town by storm.