inute before Miss Sharp's arrival; and
she handed the articles over to Sir Pitt, who had taken his
seat by the fire.

"Where's the farden?" said he. "I gave you three-halfpence;
where's the change, old Tinker?"

"There," replied Mrs. Tinker, flinging down the coin. "It's
only baronets as cares about farthings."

Sir Pitt Crawley has always been to me a stretch of audacity which I
have been unable to understand. But it has been accepted; and from this
commencement of Sir Pitt Crawley have grown the wonderful characters of
the Crawley family,--old Miss Crawley, the worldly, wicked,
pleasure-loving aunt, the Rev. Bute Crawley and his wife, who are quite
as worldly, the sanctimonious elder son, who in truth is not less so,
and Rawdon, who ultimately becomes Becky's husband,--who is the bad hero
of the book, as Dobbin is the good hero. They are admirable; but it is
quite clear that Thackeray had known nothing of what was coming about
them when he caused Sir Pitt to eat his tripe with Mrs. Tinker in the
London dining-room.

There is a double story running through the book, the parts of which are
but lightly woven together, of which the former tells us the life and
adventures of that singular young woman Becky Sharp, and the other the
troubles and ultimate success of our noble hero Captain Dobbin. Though
it be true that readers prefer, or pretend to prefer, the romantic to
the common in their novels, and complain of pages which are defiled with
that which is low, yet I find that the absurd, the ludicrous, and even
the evil, leave more impression behind them than the grand, the
beautiful, or even the good. Dominie Sampson, Dugald Dalgetty, and
Bothwell are, I think, more remembered than Fergus MacIvor, than Ivanhoe
himself, or Mr. Butler the minister. It certainly came to pass that, in
spite of the critics, Becky Sharp became the first attraction in _Vanity
Fair_. When we speak now of _Vanity Fair_, it is always to Becky that
our thoughts recur. She has made a position for herself in the world of
fiction, and is one of our established personages.

I have already said how she left school, throwing the "dixonary" out of
the window, like dust from her feet, and was taken to spend a few
halcyon weeks with her friend Amelia Sedley, at the Sedley mansion in
Russell Square. There she meets a brother Sedley home from India,--the
immortal Jos,--at whom she began to set her hitherto untried cap. Here
w