Respect!--the very menials,
who wait behind your supper-table, waited at a duke's yesterday, and
actually patronise you! O you silly spendthrift! you can buy flattery for
twopence, and you spend ever so much money in entertaining your equals
and betters, and nobody admires you!
Now Aunt Honeyman was a woman of a thousand virtues; cheerful, frugal,
honest, laborious, charitable, good-humoured, truth-telling, devoted to
her family, capable of any sacrifice for those she loved; and when she
came to have losses of money, Fortune straightway compensated her by many
kindnesses which no income can supply. The good old lady admired the word
gentlewoman of all others in the English vocabulary, and made all around
her feel that such was her rank. Her mother's father was a naval captain;
her father had taken pupils, got a living, sent his son to college, dined
with the squire, published his volume of sermons, was liked in his
parish, where Miss Honeyman kept house for him, was respected for his
kindness and famous for his port wine; and so died, leaving about two
hundred pounds a year to his two children, nothing to Clive Newcome's
mother who had displeased him by her first marriage (an elopement with
Ensign Casey) and subsequent light courses.
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