speculating.
O brother wearers of motley! are there not moments when one grows sick of
grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear friends and
companions, is my amiable object - to walk with you through the Fair, to examine
the shops and the shows there; and that we should all come home after the flare,
and the noise, and the gaiety, and be perfectly miserable in private.
 
»If that poor man of mine had a head on his shoulders,« Mrs. Bute Crawley
thought to herself, »how useful he might be, under present circumstances, to
this unhappy old lady! He might make her repent of her shocking free-thinking
ways; he might urge her to do her duty, and cast off that odious reprobate who
has disgraced himself and his family; and he might induce her to do justice to
my dear girls and the two boys, who require and deserve, I am sure, every
assistance which their relatives can give them.«
    And, as the hatred of vice is always a progress towards virtue, Mrs. Bute
Crawley endeavoured to instil into her sister-in-law a proper abhorrence for all
Rawdon Crawley's manifold sins; of which his uncle's wife brought forward such a
catalogue as indeed would have served to condemn a whole regiment of young
officers. If a man has committed wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more
anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations; so Mrs.
Bute showed a perfect family interest and knowledge of Rawdon's history. She had
all the particulars of that ugly quarrel with Captain Marker, in which Rawdon,
wrong from the beginning, ended in shooting the Captain. She knew how the
unhappy Lord Dovedale, whose mamma had taken a house at Oxford so that he might
be educated there, and who had never touched a card in his life till he came to
London, was perverted by Rawdon at the Cocoa-Tree, made helplessly tipsy by this
abominable seducer and perverter of youth, and fleeced of four thousand pounds.
She described with the most vivid minuteness the agonies of the country families
whom he had ruined - the sons whom he had plunged into dishonour and poverty -
the daughters whom he had inveigled into perdition. She knew the poor tradesmen
who were bankrupt by his extravagance - the mean shifts and rogueries with which
he had ministered to it - the astounding falsehoods by which he had imposed upon
the most generous of aunts, and the ingratitude and ridicule by which he had
repaid her sacrifices. She imparted