“The City square has no enclosure, save the lamp-post in the middle, and no grass but the weeds which spring up around its base. It is a quiet, little-frequented, retired spot, favourable to melancholy and contemplation, and appointments of long waiting. . . . In winter-time the snow will linger there long after it has melted from the busy streets and highways. The summer’s sun holds it in some respect, and while he darts his cheerful rays sparingly into the square, keeps his fiery heat and glare for noisier and less imposing precincts. It is so quiet, that you can almost hear the ticking of your own watch, when you stop to cool in its refreshing atmosphere. There is a distant hum—of coaches, not of insects—but no other sound disturbs the stillness of the square.”
The Residence of Mrs. Wititterly is referred to as having been pleasantly situated in Cadogan Place, Sloane Street—
“Cadogan Place is the one slight bond which joins two extremities; it is the connecting link between the aristocratic pavements of Belgrave Square and the barbarism of Chelsea. It is in Sloane Street, but not of it. The people of Cadogan Place look down upon Sloane Street, and think Brompton low. They affect fashion, too, and wonder where the New Road is. Not that they claim to be on precisely the same footing as the high folks of Belgrave Square and Grosvenor Place, but that they stand, in reference to them, rather in the light of those illegitimate children of the great, who are content to boast of their connexions, although their connexions disavow them.”
“The Golden Key”—the house of honest _Gabriel Varden_, the locksmith—was in Clerkenwell, situated in a quiet street not far from the Charter House—
“A modest building, not very straight, not large, not tall, not bold-faced, with great staring windows, but a shy, blinking house, with a conical roof going up into a peak over its garret window of four small panes of glass, like a cocked hat on the head of an elderly gentleman with one eye. It was not built of brick, or lofty stone, but of wood and plaster; it was not planned with a dull and wearisome regard to regularity, for no one window matched the other, or seemed to have the slightest reference to anything beside itself.”