’Lady Denham had been a rich Miss Brereton, born to wealth, but not to education.  Her first husband had been a Mr. Hollis, a man of considerable property in the country, of which a large share of the parish of Sanditon, with manor and mansion-house, formed a part.  He had been an elderly man when she married him; her own age about thirty.  Her motives for such a match could be little understood at the distance of forty years, but she had so well nursed and pleased Mr. Hollis that at his death he left her everything—­all his estates, and all at her disposal.  After a widowhood of some years she had been induced to marry again.  The late Sir Harry Denham, of Denham Park, in the neighbourhood of Sanditon, succeeded in removing her and her large income to his own domains; but he could not succeed in the views of permanently enriching his family which were attributed to him.  She had been too wary to put anything out of her own power, and when, on Sir Harry’s death, she returned again to her own house at Sanditon, she was said to have made this boast, “that though she had got nothing but her title from the family, yet she had given nothing for it.”  For the title it was to be supposed that she married.

’Lady Denham was indeed a great lady, beyond the common wants of society; for she had many thousands a year to bequeath, and three distinct sets of people to be courted by:—­her own relations, who might very reasonably wish for her original thirty thousand pounds among them; the legal heirs of Mr. Hollis, who might hope to be more indebted to her sense of justice than he had allowed them to be to his; and those members of the Denham family for whom her second husband had hoped to make a good bargain.  By all these, or by branches of them, she had, no doubt, been long and still continued to be well attacked; and of these three divisions Mr. Parker did not hesitate to say that Mr. Hollis’s kindred were the least in favour, and Sir Harry Denham’s the most.  The former, he believed, had done themselves irremediable harm by expressions of very unwise resentment at the time of Mr. Hollis’s death:  the latter, to the advantage of being the remnant of a connection which she certainly valued, joined those of having been known to her from their childhood, and of being always at hand to pursue their interests by seasonable attentions.  But another claimant was now to be taken into account:  a young female relation whom Lady Denham had been induced to receive into her family.  After having always protested against any such addition, and often enjoyed the repeated defeat she had given to every attempt of her own relations to introduce ‘this young lady, or that young lady,’ as a companion at Sanditon House, she had brought back with her from London last Michaelmas a Miss Clara Brereton, who bid fair to vie in favour with Sir Edward Denham, and to secure for herself and her family that share of the accumulated property which they had certainly the best right to inherit.’