intensely interesting -
crime. My rascals are no milk-and-water rascals, I promise you. When we come to
the proper places we won't spare fine language - No, no! But when we are going
over the quiet country we must perforce be calm. A tempest in a slop-basin is
absurd. We will reserve that sort of thing for the mighty ocean and the lonely
midnight. The present chapter is very mild. Others -- But we will not anticipate
those.
    And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and a
brother, not only to introduce them, but occasionally to step down from the
platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to love them and
shake them by the hand; if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in
the reader's sleeve; if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the
strongest terms which politeness admits of.
    Otherwise you might fancy it was I who was sneering at the practice of
devotion, which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous; that it was I who laughed
good-humouredly at the reeling old Silenus of a baronet - whereas the laughter
comes from one who has no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for
anything beyond success. Such people there are living and flourishing in the
world - Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless; let us have at them, dear friends,
with might and main. Some there are, and very successful too, mere quacks and
fools: and it was to combat and expose such as those, no doubt, that Laughter
was made.
 

                                   Chapter IX

                               Family Portraits.

Sir Pitt Crawley was a philosopher with a taste for what is called low life. His
first marriage with the daughter of the noble Binkie had been made under the
auspices of his parents; and as he often told Lady Crawley in her lifetime she
was such a confounded quarrelsome high-bred jade that when she died he was
hanged if he would take another of her sort, at her ladyship's demise he kept
his promise, and selected for a second wife Miss Rose Dawson, daughter of Mr.
John Thomas Dawson, ironmonger, of Mudbury. What a happy woman was Rose to be my
Lady Crawley!
    Let us set down the items of her happiness. In the first place, she gave up
Peter Butt, a young man who kept company with her, and in consequence of his
disappointment in love, took to smuggling, poaching, and a thousand other bad
courses. Then she quarrelled, as in duty