"Glorvina had flirted with all the marriageable officers, whom the depots of her country afforded, and all the bachelor squires who seemed eligible. She had been engaged to be married a half-score of times in Ireland, besides the clergyman at Bath, who had used her so ill. She had flirted all the way to Madras with the captain and chief-mate of the Ramchunder East Indiaman, and had a season at the Presidency. Everybody admired her; everybody danced with her; but no one proposed that was worth marrying.... Undismayed by forty or fifty previous defeats, Glorvina laid siege to Major Dobbin. She sang Irish melodies at him unceasingly. She asked him so frequently and so pathetically 'Will you come to the bower,' that it is a wonder how any man of feeling could have resisted the invitation. She was never tired of inquiring if 'Sorrow had his young days faded,' and was ready to listen and weep like Desdemona at the stories of his dangers and campaigns. She was constantly writing notes over to him at his house, borrowing his books, and scoring with her great pencil marks such passages of sentiment or humour, as awakened her sympathy. No wonder that public rumour assigned her to him." In the following, Thackeray is more severe-- "His wife never cared about being called Lady Newcome. To manage the great house of Hobson brothers and Newcome, to attend to the interests of the enslaved negro: to awaken the benighted Hottentot to a sense of the truth; to convert Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Papists; to arouse the indifferent and often blasphemous mariner; to guide the washerwoman in the right way; to head all the public charities of her sect, and do a thousand secret kindnesses that none knew of; to answer myriads of letters, pension, endless ministers, and supply their teeming wives with continuous baby-linen, to hear preachers daily bawling for hours, and listen untired on her knees, after a long day's labour, while florid rhapsodists belaboured cushions above her with wearisome benedictions; all these things had this woman to do, and for nearly fourscore years she fought her fight womanfully." This pious lady's residence was a "serious Paradise;"