Cockayne was the veriest tyrant behind people's backs; he
who, as a neighbour of his very expressively put the case, dared not
help himself to the fresh butter without having previously asked the
permission of his wife. Fate, in order to try the good-nature of
Timothy Cockayne to the utmost, had given him two daughters closely
resembling, in patient endurance and self-abnegation, their
irreproachable mamma. Sophonisba--at whom the reader has already had a
glimpse, and whom we last saw demolishing her second _baba_ at Felix's,
was the eldest daughter--and the second was Theodosia. There was a
third, Carrie; she was the blue, and was gentle and contented with
everything, like her father.

The reader may now be prepared to learn that it was not Mr. Timothy
Cockayne, late of Lambeth, who had planned the family's journey to
Paris. Mrs. Cockayne had projected the expedition. Everybody went to
Paris now-a-days, and you looked so very stupid if you had to confess in
a drawing-room that you had never been. She was sure there was not
another family on Clapham Common, of their station, who had not been.
Besides, it would exercise the girls' French. If Mr. Cockayne could only
consent to tear himself away from board-meetings, and devote a little
time to his own flesh and blood. They would go alone, and not trouble
him, only what would their neighbours say to see them start off alone,
as though they'd nobody in the world to care a fig about them. At any
rate, they didn't want people to know they were neglected. Now Mr.
Cockayne had never had the most distant idea of leaving the ladies of
his family to go alone to Paris. But it pleased his wife to put the case
in this pleasant way, and he never interfered with her pleasures. He
wanted very much to see Paris again, for he had never been on the banks
of the Seine since 1840, when he made a flying visit to examine some new
patent soap-boiling apparatus. He was ordered about by both mother and
daughters, by boat and railway. He was reproached fifty times for his
manners in insisting on going the Dieppe route. He was loaded with
parcels and baskets and rugs, and was soundly rated all the way from the
railway station to the Grand Hotel, on the Boulevard des Capucines, for
having permitted the Custom House officers to turn over Mrs. Cockayne's
boxes, as she said, "in the most impudent manner; but they saw she was
without protection."

I have always been at a loss to discover why certain cla