We must give precedence to wealth and age.  The lady last mentioned was a Miss Tavistock, born and educated in the city, where her father had long been at the head of the well-established firm of Tavistock, Bottlecock & Co., Dyers, Calenderers, and Scourers.  As we before observed, she was the fortunate sole heiress to her father’s accumulation, which might amount to nearly thirty thousand pounds; but had been little gifted by nature.  In fact, she was what you may style most preposterously ugly; her figure was large and masculine; her hair red; and her face very deeply indented with the small-pox.  As a man, she would have been considered the essence of vulgarity; as a woman, she was the quintessence:  so much so, that she had arrived at the age of thirty-six without having, notwithstanding her property, received any attentions which could be construed into an offer.  As we always seek most eagerly that which we find most difficult to obtain, she was possessed with une fureur de se marier; and, as a last resource, had resolved to go out to India, where she had been informed that “anything white” was acceptable.  This passion for matrimony (for with her it had so become, if not a disease) occupied her whole thoughts; but she attempted to veil them by always pretending to be extremely sensitive and refined; to be shocked at anything which had the slightest allusion to the “increase and multiply;” and constantly lamented the extreme fragility of her constitution; to which her athletic bony frame gave so determined a lie, that her hearers were struck dumb with the barefaced assertion.  Miss Tavistock had kept up a correspondence with an old schoolmate, who had been taken away early to join her friends in India, and had there married.  As her hopes of matrimony dwindled away, so did her affection for her old friend appear, by her letters, to increase.  At last, in answer to a letter, in which she declared that she would like to come out, and (as she had long made a resolution to continue single) adopt one of her friend’s children, and pass her days with them, she received an answer, stating how happy they would be to receive her, and personally renew the old friendship, if indeed she could be persuaded to venture upon so long and venturous a passage.  Whether this answer was sincere or not, Miss Tavistock took advantage of the invitation; and writing to intimate her speedy arrival, took her passage in the Bombay Castle.

The other three spinsters were sisters:  Charlotte, Laura, and Isabel Revel, daughters of the Honourable Mr Revel, a roue of excellent family, who had married for money, and had dissipated all his wife’s fortune except the marriage settlement of L600 per annum.  Their mother was a selfish, short-sighted, manoeuvring woman, whose great anxiety was to form establishments for her daughters, or, in other terms, remove the expense of their maintenance from her own to the shoulders of other people, very indifferent