' worth of plate and profusion, hired
footmen, turning their houses topsy-turvy, and suppers from Gunter's.
Adulation!--why, the people who come to you give as good parties as
you do. Respect!--the very menials, who wait behind your supper-table,
waited at a duke's yesterday, and actually patronise you! O you silly
spendthrift! you can buy flattery for twopence, and you spend ever so
much money in entertaining your equals and betters, and nobody admires
you!

Now Aunt Honeyman was a woman of a thousand virtues; cheerful, frugal,
honest, laborious, charitable, good-humoured, truth-telling, devoted to
her family, capable of any sacrifice for those she loved; and when she
came to have losses of money, Fortune straightway compensated her by
many kindnesses which no income can supply. The good old lady admired
the word gentlewoman of all others in the English vocabulary, and made
all around her feel that such was her rank. Her mother's father was a
naval captain; her father had taken pupils, got a living, sent his son
to college, dined with the squire, published his volume of sermons,
was liked in his parish, where Miss Honeyman kept house for him, was
respected for his kindness and famous for his port wine; and so died,
leaving about two hundred pounds a year to his two children, nothing to
Clive Newcome's mother who had displeased him by her first marriage
(an elopement with Ensign Casey) and subsequent light courses. Charles
Honeyman spent his money elegantly in wine-parties at Oxford, and
afterwards in foreign travel;--spent his money and as much of Miss
Honeyman's as that worthy soul would give him. She was a woman of spirit
and resolution. She brought her furniture to Brighton (believing that
the whole place still fondly remembered her grandfather, Captain Nokes,
who had resided there and his gallantry in Lord Rodney's action with the
Count de Grasse), took a house, and let the upper floors to lodgers.

The little brisk old lady brought a maid-servant out of the country with
her, who was daughter to her father's clerk, and had learned her letters
and worked her first sampler under Miss Honeyman's own eye, whom she
adored all through her life. No Indian begum rolling in wealth, no
countess mistress of castles and townhouses, ever had such a faithful
toady as Hannah Hicks was to her mistress. Under Hannah was a young lady
from the workhouse, who called Hannah "Mrs. Hicks, mum," and who bowed
in awe as much before that d