 he was.
    »He be a bad'n, sure enough,« Mr. Horrocks remarked; »and his man Flethers
is wuss, and have made such a row in the housekeeper's room about the dinners
and hale, as no lord would make. But I think Miss Sharp's a match for'n, Sir
Pitt,« he added, after a pause.
    And so, in truth, she was - for father and son too.
 

                                  Chapter XII

                          Quite a Sentimental Chapter.

We must now take leave of Arcadia, and those amiable people practising the rural
virtues there, and travel back to London, to inquire what has become of Miss
Amelia. »We don't care a fig for her,« writes some unknown correspondent with a
pretty little handwriting and a pink seal to her note. »She is fade and
insipid,« and adds some more kind remarks in this strain, which I should never
have repeated at all, but that they are in truth prodigiously complimentary to
the young lady whom they concern.
    Has the beloved reader, in his experience of society, never heard similar
remarks by good-natured female friends; who always wonder what you can see in
Miss Smith that is so fascinating; or what could induce Major Jones to propose
for that silly, insignificant, simpering Miss Thompson, who has nothing but her
wax-doll face to recommend her? What is there in a pair of pink cheeks and blue
eyes forsooth? these dear Moralists ask, and hint wisely that the gifts of
genius, the accomplishments of the mind, the mastery of Mangnall's Questions,
and a ladylike knowledge of botany and geology, the knack of making poetry, the
power of rattling sonatas in the Herz-manner, and so forth, are far more
valuable endowments for a female, than those fugitive charms which a few years
will inevitably tarnish. It is quite edifying to hear women speculate upon the
worthlessness and the duration of beauty.
    But though virtue is a much finer thing, and those hapless creatures who
suffer under the misfortune of good looks ought to be continually put in mind of
the fate which awaits them; and though, very likely, the heroic female character
which ladies admire is a more glorious and beautiful object than the kind,
fresh, smiling, artless, tender little domestic goddess, whom men are inclined
to worship - yet the latter and inferior sort of women must have this
consolation - that the men do admire them after all; and that, in spite of all
our kind friend's warnings and protests, we go on in
