She kept three maid-servants, and a man came in every day to clean the knives and boots.  Service with her was well requited, and much labour was never exacted.  But it was not every young woman who could live with her.  A rigidity as to hours, as to religious exercises, and as to dress, was exacted, under which many poor girls altogether broke down; but they who could stand this rigidity came to know that their places were very valuable.  No one belonging to them need want for aught, when once the good opinion of Miss Stanbury had been earned.  When once she believed in her servant there was nobody like that servant.  There was not a man in Exeter could clean a boot except Giles Hickbody and if not in Exeter, then where else?  And her own maid Martha, who had lived with her now for twenty years, and who had come with her to the brick house when she first inhabited it, was such a woman that no other servant anywhere was fit to hold a candle to her.  But then Martha had great gifts, was never ill, and really liked having sermons read to her.

Such was Miss Stanbury, who had now discarded her nephew Hugh.  She had never been tenderly affectionate to Hugh, or she would hardly have asked him to live in London on a hundred a year.  She had never really been kind to him since he was a boy, for although she had paid for him, she had been almost penurious in her manner of doing so, and had repeatedly-given him to understand, that in the event of her death not a shilling would be left to him.  Indeed, as to that matter of bequeathing her money, it was understood that it was her purpose to let it all go back to the Burgess family.  With the Burgess family she had kept up no sustained connection, it being quite understood that she was never to be asked to meet the only one of them now left in Exeter.  Nor was it as yet known to any one in what manner the money was to go back, how it was to be divided, or who were to be the recipients.  But she had declared that it should go back, explaining that she had conceived it to be a duty to let her own relations know that they would not inherit her wealth at her death.

About a week after she had sent back poor Hugh’s letter with the endorsement on it as to unworthy bread, she summoned Martha to the back parlour in which she was accustomed to write her letters.  It was one of the theories of her life that different rooms should be used only for the purposes for which they were intended.  She never allowed pens and ink up into the bed-rooms, and had she ever heard that any guest in her house was reading in bed, she would have made an instant personal attack upon that guest, whether male or female, which would have surprised that guest.  Poor Hugh would have got on better with her had he not been discovered once smoking in the garden.  Nor would she have writing materials in the drawing-room or dining-room.  There was a chamber behind the dining-room in which there was an inkbottle, and if there was a letter to be written, let the writer go there and write it.  In the writing of many letters, however, she put no confidence, and regarded penny postage as one of the strongest evidences of the coming ruin.