e the boy had
grown up; the veriest tyrant and idol of his sisters and father.

To Brighton George and Amelia went on their honeymoon, and there they met
Becky Sharp and her husband. Though the circumstances of the two young
women's career had altered, Amelia and Becky were unchanged in character,
but that is of small concern to us, except as it affects their children,
to whose lives we now turn with keen interest, noting how they reflect
the dispositions, and are affected by the characters of their mothers.

As for little Rawdon Crawley, Becky's only child, he had few early happy
recollections of his mother. She had not, to say the truth, seen much of
the young gentleman since his birth. After the amiable fashion of French
mothers, she had placed him out at nurse in a village in the
neighbourhood of Paris, where little Rawdon lived, not unhappily, with a
numerous family of foster brothers in wooden shoes. His father, who was
devotedly attached to the little fellow, would ride over many a time to
see him here, and the elder Rawdon's paternal heart glowed to see him
rosy and dirty, shouting lustily, and happy in the making of mud-pies
under the superintendence of the gardener's wife, his nurse.

Rebecca, however, did not care much to go and see her son and heir, who
as a result preferred his nurse's caresses to his mamma's, and when
finally he quitted that jolly nurse, he cried loudly for hours. He was
only consoled by his mother's promise that he should return to his nurse
the next day; which promise, it is needless to say, was not kept; instead
the boy was consigned to the care of a French maid, Genevieve, while his
mother was seldom with him, and the French woman was so neglectful of her
young charge that at one time he very narrowly escaped drowning on Calais
sands, where Genevieve had left and lost him.

So with little care and less love his childhood passed until presently
he went with his father and mother, Colonel and Mrs. Crawley, to London,
to their new home in Curzon Street, Mayfair. There little Rawdon's time
was mostly spent hidden upstairs in a garret somewhere, or crawling
below into the kitchen for companionship. His mother scarcely ever took
notice of him. He passed the days with his French nurse as long as she
remained in the family, and when she went away, a housemaid took
compassion on the little fellow, who was howling in the loneliness of
the night, and got him out of his solitary nursery into her