Lucius Davoren, Volume I by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Geoffrey went to the concert at the Stillmington Assembly Rooms that evening, his disappointment notwithstanding. Granted that he had comported himself in a mean and cad-like fashion; granted that this woman he loved was colder than granite, unapproachable as the rocky spurs of Australian mountains, whose sheer height the foot of man has never scaled; granted that his passion was of all follies the maddest,-he loved her still. That one truth remained, unshaken and abiding, fixed as the centre of this revolving globe. He loved her.

The audience at the Assembly Rooms that evening was not large; indeed, Stillmington spent so much money upon gentility as to have little left for pleasure. The Stillmingtonites visited one another in closed flies, which were solemnly announced towards the end of each entertainment as Colonel or Mr. So-and-so's carriage. The distance that divided their several abodes was of the smallest, yet he was a daring innovator who ventured to take his wife on foot to a Stillmington dinner-party, rather than immure her during the brief journey in one of Spark's flies. Concerts, however, the Stillmingtonites approved as a fashionable and aristocratic form of entertainment-not boisterously amusing, and appealing to the higher orders, for the most part through the genteel medium of foreign languages. There was generally, therefore, a fair sprinkling of the _élite_ of Stillmington in the Assembly Room on such occasions, and there was a fair sprinkling to-night-a faint flutter of fans, an assortment of patrician shoulders draped with opera cloaks of white or crimson; an imposing display of elderly gentlemen with shining bald heads and fierce gray whiskers; and, on the narrower benches devoted to the vulgar herd, a sparse assemblage of tradesmen's wives and daughters in their best bonnets.