or clever, or of imposing manners,—­nor was she of high birth.  But neither was she ugly, nor unbearably stupid.  Her manners were, at any rate, innocent; and as to her birth,—­seeing that, from the first, she was not supposed to have had any,—­no disappointment was felt.  Her father had been a coal-merchant.  She was always called Mrs George, and the effort made respecting her by everybody in and about the family was to treat her as though she were a figure of a woman, a large well-dressed resemblance of a being, whom it was necessary for certain purposes that the de Courcys should carry in their train.  Of the Honourable George we may further observe, that, having been a spendthrift all his life, he had now become strictly parsimonious.  Having reached the discreet age of forty, he had at last learned that beggary was objectionable; and he, therefore, devoted every energy of his mind to saving shillings and pence wherever pence and shillings might be saved.  When first this turn came upon him both his father and mother were delighted to observe it; but, although it had hardly yet lasted over twelve months, some evil results were beginning to appear.  Though possessed of an income, he would take no steps towards possessing himself of a house.  He hung by the paternal mansion, either in town or country; drank the paternal wines, rode the paternal horses, and had even contrived to obtain his wife’s dresses from the maternal milliner.  In the completion of which little last success, however, some slight family dissent had showed itself.

The Honourable John, the third son, was also at Courcy.  He had as yet taken to himself no wife, and as he had not hitherto made himself conspicuously useful in any special walk of life his family were beginning to regard him as a burden.  Having no income of his own to save, he had not copied his brother’s virtue of parsimony; and, to tell the truth plainly, had made himself so generally troublesome to his father, that he had been on more than one occasion threatened with expulsion from the family roof.  But it is not easy to expel a son.  Human fledglings cannot be driven out of the nest like young birds.  An Honourable John turned adrift into absolute poverty will make himself heard of in the world,—­if in no other way, by his ugliness as he starves.  A thorough-going ne’er-do-well in the upper classes has eminent advantages on his side in the battle which he fights against respectability.  He can’t be sent to Australia against his will.  He can’t be sent to the poorhouse without the knowledge of all the world.  He can’t be kept out of tradesmen’s shops; nor, without terrible scandal, can he be kept away from the paternal properties.  The earl had threatened, and snarled, and shown his teeth; he was an angry man, and a man who could look very angry; with eyes which could almost become red, and a brow that wrinkled itself in perpendicular wrinkles, sometimes very terrible to behold.  But he was an inconsistent man, and the Honourable John had learned to measure his father, and in an accurate balance.