Thus the world began for these two young ladies.  For Amelia it was quite a new, fresh, brilliant world, with all the bloom upon it.  It was not quite a new one for Rebecca, who, before she came to the Mall, as a governess-pupil, had turned many a dun away from her father’s door.  She had never been a girl, she said:  she had been a woman since she was eight years old.

At Russell Square Rebecca saw the two magnificent Cashmere shawls which Joseph Sedley of the East India Company’s Civil Service had brought home to his sister, said with perfect truth that it must be delightful to have a brother, and easily got the pity of the tender-hearted Amelia for being alone in the world.  A series of queries, addressed to her friend, brought Rebecca, who was but nineteen, to the following conclusion:—­“As Mr. Joseph Sedley is rich and unmarried, why should I not marry him?  I have only a fortnight, to be sure, but there is no harm in trying.”  I don’t think we have any right to blame her, if Rebecca did not set her heart upon the conquest of this beau, for she had no kind parents to arrange these delicate matters for her.

But Mr. Joseph Sedley, greedy, vain, and cowardly, would not be brought up to the sticking point.  Young George Osborne, Captain of the —­th, old Sedley’s godson, and the accepted lover of Amelia, thought Joseph was a milksop.  He turned over in his mind, as the Sedleys did, the possibility of marriage between Joseph and Rebecca, and was not over well pleased that a member of a family into which he, George Osborne, was going to marry, should make a mesalliance with a little nobody—­a little upstart governess.  “Hang it, the family’s low enough already without her,” Osborne said to his friend Captain Dobbin.  “A governess is all very well, but I’d rather have a lady for my sister-in-law.  I’m a liberal man; but I’ve proper pride, and know my own station:  let her know hers.  And I’ll take down that hectoring Nabob, and prevent him from being made a greater fool than he is.  That’s why I told him to look out, lest she brought an action against him.”

Joseph Sedley fled to Cheltenham, and Rebecca said in her heart, “It was George Osborne who prevented my marriage.”  And she loved George Osborne accordingly.

Miss Amelia would have been delighted that Joseph should carry back a wife to India.  Old Mr. Sedley was neutral.  “Let Joseph marry whom he likes,” he said to his wife.  “It’s no affair of mine.  This girl has no fortune; no more had Mrs. Sedley.  She seems good-humoured and clever, and will keep him in order, perhaps.  Better she, my dear, than a black Mrs. Sedley, and a dozen of mahogany grandchildren.  As I am perfectly sure that if you and I and his sister were to die to-morrow, he would say ‘Good Gad!’ and eat his dinner just as well as usual, I am not going to make myself anxious about him.  Let him marry whom he likes.  It’s no affair of mine.”