However Mrs. Sullivan had failed in the character of a wife, she had always been weakly indulgent as a mother, and was easily led by her children into every expensive folly. Her son's command of money had made him, on his first entrance into life, a very desirable acquaintance to some needy young men of fashion, who, in return for the pecuniary accommodation he afforded them, did him the favour to turn his head and corrupt his morals. As he became daily more ambitious to emulate his new associates in all their extravagance, he persuaded his mother to change her style of living, in order to imitate as closely as possible that of the relatives of his _professed_ friends. At this critical period, he had unfortunately found Mr. Sullivan no less solicitous of joining those secondary circles of fashion, to which alone they could expect admittance, from his having long been accustomed to lead as a bachelor a life of gaiety and dissipation; and the Miss Webberlys still more zealously promoted his wishes, being equally solicitous to reach the threshold of fashion, which had long been the unattained object of their highest hope. This was perhaps the only point in the chapter of possibilities, on which the whole family could agree. Mrs. Sullivan reversed the order of nature, and followed the path her children traced for her, supposing them to be better instructed in such things than herself; for she knew they had received a superabundance of the _means_, and, poor woman! she had not sense to perceive they had missed the _ends_ of education. In encouraging her children in the pursuit of fashionable follies, Mrs. Sullivan but followed the general example of wealthy parents, whom we so frequently behold acting like the worshippers of Moloch in elder days, making their sons and their daughters pass through the fires of dissipation, in the chance of drawing them forth from the ordeal with greater external brightness; but the scorching flames too often wither to the root the shoots of honour, benevolence, and truth. In nothing was Mrs. Sullivan's lamentable imitation of her children's follies more perceptible, than in her conversation, which was a mixture of Cheapside vulgarisms and Newmarket cant, with here and there a stray ornament from her daughters' vocabularies of sentimental and scientifical jargon; the whole misapplied and mispronounced, in a manner that would have done honour to Mrs. Malaprop herself!