Let us however turn now to lighter themes. One of Thackeray’s most delightful characters is the old Countess of Kew, the sister of the late Marquis of Steyne and the grandmother of Lord Kew and Ethel Newcome. The old lady frankly, and with a cynicism worthy of her brother, accepts the new order. She marries her daughter, Lady Ann, to Sir Brian Newcome, with complete disregard of the young lady’s preference for her cousin, Tom Poyntz. “Sir Brian Newcome,” she would say, “is one of the most stupid and respectable of men; Ann is clever but has not a grain of common sense. They make a very well-assorted couple. Her flightiness would have driven any man crazy who had an opinion of his own. She would have ruined any poor man of her own rank. As it is I have given her a husband exactly suited to her. He pays the bills, does not see how absurd she is, keeps order in the establishment and checks her follies. She wanted to marry her Cousin, Tom Poyntz, when they were both very young, and proposed to die of a broken heart ... a broken fiddlestick! She would have ruined Tom Poyntz in a year, and has no more idea of the cost of a leg of mutton than I have of Algebra.” Her ladyship was under no delusions as to the antiquity of her husband’s family, the founder of which was a fashionable doctor who had attended George III. She recognised that the great houses to which she belonged had had their day and was resolved to make the best she could out of the world she lived in. She had the brains and the character to make that world thoroughly uncomfortable if it did not bow to her will, and with her the old order began to come to an end. “_Was_ my grandfather a weaver?” asks Ethel Newcome. Her answer is: “How should I know? And what on earth does it matter, my child? Except the Gaunts, the Howards, and one or two more, there is no good blood in England. You are lucky in sharing some of mine. My poor Lord Kew’s grandfather was an apothecary at Hampton Court, and founded the family by giving a dose of rhubarb to Queen Charlotte. As a rule nobody is of good family.”