He Wants to Get Rich Too Quick"
XLVII. As for Love!
XLVIII. "Has He Ill-treated You?"
XLIX. "Where Is Guatemala?"
L. Mr. Slide's Revenge
LI. Coddling the Prime Minister
LII. "I Can Sleep Here To-night, I Suppose?"
LIII. Mr. Hartlepod
LIV. Lizzie
LV. Mrs. Parker's Sorrows
LVI. What the Duchess Thought of Her Husband
LVII. The Explanation
LVIII. "Quite Settled"
LIX. "The First and the Last"
LX. The Tenway Junction
LXI. The Widow and Her Friends
LXII. Phineas Finn Has a Book to Read
LXIII. The Duchess and Her Friend
LXIV. The New K.G.
LXV. "There Must Be Time"
LXVI. The End of the Session
LXVII. Mrs. Lopez Prepares to Move
LXVIII. The Prime Minister's Political Creed
LXIX. Mrs. Parker's Fate
LXX. At Wharton
LXXI. The Ladies at Longbarns Doubt
LXXII. "He Thinks That Our Days Are Numbered"
LXXIII. Only the Duke of Omnium
LXXIV. "I Am Disgraced and Shamed"
LXXV. The Great Wharton Alliance
LXXVI. Who Will It Be?
LXXVII. The Duchess in Manchester Square
LXXVIII. The New Ministry
LXXIX. The Wharton Wedding
LXXX. The Last Meeting at Matching

VOLUME I

CHAPTER I

Ferdinand Lopez

It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers
and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in
the upper circles of society, and also of service to be able to speak
of them as of persons who were themselves somebodies in their time.
No doubt we all entertain great respect for those who by their own
energies have raised themselves in the world; and when we hear that
the son of a washerwoman has become Lord Chancellor or Archbishop
of Canterbury we do, theoretically and abstractedly, feel a higher
reverence for such self-made magnate than for one who has been as it
were born into forensic or ecclesiastical purple. But not the less
must the offspring of the washerwoman have had very much trouble on
the subject of his birth, unless he has been, when young as well as
when old, a very great man indeed. After the goal has been absolutely
reached, and the honour and the titles and the wealth actually
won, a man may talk with some humour, even with some affection, of
the maternal tub;--but while the struggle is going on, with the
conviction strong upon the struggler that he cannot be altogether