There was nothing he could exactly dare to do to injure his cousins; but he hated them both, and kept an evil eye upon them. As for his female cousins, he did not take the trouble of actively hating them, he merely despised them as beings shut out from all possibility of inheriting the property. Beautiful and high born as they were, he would not have accepted the hand of any one of them had it been offered to him. Sir Willoughby was goodnaturedly weak, and very vain;--his was a vanity however which, when it happened to be gratified, made him extremely happy, by keeping him in the highest good humour with himself. From him Geoffery won large sums at billiards, by flattering him on his play, 'till he induced him to give him, habitually, such odds as amounted, in point of fact, to giving him the game, or, in other words, the sum staked upon it. Lady Arden often endeavoured to dissuade her son from acquiring so bad a habit as that of gambling, but in vain; for Willoughby, like all weak men, was obstinate to excess: he had besides a marvellous respect for the salique law, and that jealousy of being guided, which unhappily always forms a leading feature in the characters of those who stand most in need of guidance. Yet he was fondly attached to his mother; his greatest delight was to devise something for her pleasure or her accommodation; he was always ready to make her munificent presents; in short, he would do any thing to oblige her, with the exception of following her suggestions. Not that he always ungraciously refused requests that contained in them nothing prohibitory; he had no particular objection sometimes to do a thing he was asked to do; but a thing he was asked not to do, he was always sure to do! And if it happened to be a thing which Geoffery Arden wished should be done, he could always decide the point, by artfully complimenting his cousin on the _firmness_ of his character. Of Alfred, Geoffery could make nothing. He was frank, kind, and open-hearted; yet clear-seeing and decided. With him his mother's slightest wish but guessed at was a law: his sisters, too, could always coax him out of any plan of pleasure of his own, and get him to go with them. Not so those for whom he had no particular affection; he had never yet been known, in any one instance, to sacrifice his opinion of what was right, respectable, or amiable, to the persuasions of idle companions; so that he was already respected as well as regarded by thinking and discerning men much older than himself; some of them too, men who had bought their experience dearly enough and who were surprised into involuntary admiration of so young a person, who seemed to have his intuitively.