Such a figure as we have described, walking the streets alone, with a bold erect carriage, it may be believed, drew a good deal of attention, particularly at assize-time, when there were many strangers and young barristers in the town, and such of course were the occasions on which Miss Fips was fondest of making a display. Her generally walking alone, at least until she had picked up two or three young men, proceeded from a combination of circumstances: in the first place, Fips had little time for recreation, and if he had had more, his dutiful daughter would not have been fond of appearing with so unwieldly and unsightly a companion. As to other young women, Miss Fips, proud of her beauty, and the fortune she was taught to expect, treated those in her own sphere with impertinence, while it was very improbable that ladies in a sphere above her would be induced to take by the hand an inferior, whose natural boldness rendered her vulgarity and bad taste so conspicuous. Though we have used the expression natural boldness, it is most probable that the unprepossessing quality we have thus described, was in this instance both produced and strengthened into second nature by that most baneful and unsexing of lessons to a young female, early _personal_ display. The remaining traits in the character of this young woman, together with what we have already said, are quite in accordance with a favourite theory of ours, that want of personal modesty is more than a presumption both of want of heart and want of taste or genius; because it is a proof of the absence of that susceptibility--that acuteness of moral perception, the presence of which is indispensable to the mental process by which both the powers of genius and the capability of loving are developed, almost, we might say, created in the human mind. Flattery too, with the want of early control, had made the temper of Miss Fips violent and insolent in the extreme. From the time of her return from school there was no peace in the house, and little, as far as their own set went, in the town. She quarrelled with the neighbours--insulted the boarder clerks--and scolded the servants; and when Fips was too busy with his own, if not more amiable, at least more important avocations, to join her in pouring forth invectives against whoever had provoked her ire, she would stand over his desk and scold himself; or interrupted in a like tempestuous manner, the quiet enjoyment of his bottle of port, his only recreation, till his life became a perfect burden to him.