
Pendennis's laundress, was acquainted with Mrs. Rouncy, who did for Mr.
Sibwright, and that gentleman's bedroom was got ready for Miss Bell, or Mrs.
Pendennis, when the latter should be inclined to leave her son's sickroom, to
try and seek for a little rest for herself.
    If that young buck and flower of Baker Street, Percy Sibwright, could have
known who was the occupant of his bedroom, how proud he would have been of that
apartment! - what poems he would have written about Laura! (several of his
things have appeared in the annuals, and in manuscript in the nobility's albums)
- he was a Camford man, and very nearly got the English Prize Poem, it was said.
Sibwright, however, was absent, and his bed given up to Miss Bell. It was the
prettiest little brass bed in the world, with chintz curtains lined with pink.
He had a mignonette box in his bedroom window; and the mere sight of his little
exhibition of shiny boots, arranged in trim rows over his wardrobe, was a
gratification to the beholder. He had a museum of scent, pomatum, and
bears'-grease pots, quite curious to examine, too; and a choice selection of
portraits of females, almost always in sadness and generally in disguise or
deshabille, glittered round the neat walls of his elegant little bower of
repose. Medora with dishevelled hair was consoling herself over her banjo for
the absence of her Conrad; the Princess Fleur de Marie (of Rudolstein and the
»Mystères de Paris«) was sadly ogling out of the bars of her convent cage, in
which, poor prisoned bird, she was moulting away; Dorothea of »Don Quixote« was
washing her eternal feet; - in fine, it was such an elegant gallery as became a
gallant lover of the sex. And in Sibwright's sitting-room, while there was quite
an infantine law library clad in skins of fresh new-born calf, there was a
tolerably large collection of classical books which he could not read, and of
English and French works of poetry and fiction which he read a great deal too
much. His invitation cards of the past season still decorated his looking-glass;
and scarce anything told of the lawyer but the wig-box beside the Venus upon the
middle shelf of the bookcase, on which the name of P. Sibwright, Esquire, was
gilded.
    With Sibwright in chambers was Mr. Bangham. Mr. Bangham was a sporting man,
married to a rich widow. Mr. Bangham
