pprove of my
Emily.--Your affectionate Nephew, Arthur Pendennis, Jr."

When the Major had concluded the perusal of this letter, his countenance
assumed an expression of such rage and horror that Glowry, the
surgeon-official, felt in his pocket for his lancet, which he always
carried in his card-case, and thought his respected friend was going
into a fit. The intelligence was indeed sufficient to agitate Pendennis.
The head of the Pendennises going to marry an actress ten years his
senior,--a headstrong boy going to plunge into matrimony. "The mother
has spoiled the young rascal," groaned the Major inwardly, "with her
cursed sentimentality and romantic rubbish. My nephew marry a tragedy
queen! Gracious mercy, people will laugh at me so that I shall not dare
show my head!" And he thought with an inexpressible pang that he must
give up Lord Steyne's dinner at Richmond, and must lose his rest and
pass the night in an abominable tight mail-coach, instead of taking
pleasure, as he had promised himself, in some of the most agreeable and
select society in England.

And he must not only give up this but all other engagements for some
time to come. Who knows how long the business might detain him. He
quitted his breakfast table for the adjoining writing-room, and there
ruefully wrote off refusals to the Marquis, the Earl, the Bishop, and
all his entertainers; and he ordered his servant to take places in
the mail-coach for that evening, of course charging the sum which
he disbursed for the seats to the account of the widow and the young
scapegrace of whom he was guardian.

CHAPTER II. A Pedigree and other Family Matters

Early in the Regency of George the Magnificent, there lived in a small
town in the west of England, called Clavering, a gentleman whose name
was Pendennis. There were those alive who remembered having seen his
name painted on a board, which was surmounted by a gilt pestle and
mortar over the door of a very humble little shop in the city of Bath,
where Mr. Pendennis exercised the profession of apothecary and surgeon;
and where he not only attended gentlemen in their sick-rooms, and ladies
at the most interesting periods of their lives, but would condescend to
sell a brown-paper plaster to a farmer's wife across the counter,--or to
vend tooth-brushes, hair-powder, and London perfumery. For these facts
a few folks at Clavering could vouch, where people's memories were more
tenacious, perhaps, than they ar