So, forsooth, because Philip has performed this certainly most generous, most dashing, most reckless piece of extravagance, he is to be held up as a perfect _preux chevalier_. The most riotous dinners are ordered for him. We are to wait until he comes to breakfast, and he is pretty nearly always late. The children are to be sent round to kiss uncle Philip, as he is now called. The children? I wonder the mother did not jump up and kiss him too. _Elle en était capable._ As for the osculations which took place between Mrs. Pendennis and her new-found young friend, Miss Charlotte Baynes, they were perfectly ridiculous; two school children could not have behaved more absurdly; and I don’t know which seemed to be the youngest of these two. There were colloquies, assignations, meetings on the ramparts, on the pier, where know I?—and the servants and little children of the two establishments were perpetually trotting to and fro with letters from dearest Laura to dearest Charlotte, and dearest Charlotte to her dearest Mrs. Pendennis. Why, my wife absolutely went the length of saying that dearest Charlotte’s mother, Mrs. Baynes, was a worthy, clever woman, and a good mother—a woman whose tongue never ceased clacking about the regiment, and all the officers, and all the officers’ wives; of whom, by the way, she had very little good to tell. “A worthy mother, is she, my dear?” I say. “But, oh, mercy! Mrs. Baynes would be an awful mother-in-law!” I shuddered at the thought of having such a commonplace, hard, ill-bred woman in a state of quasi authority over me. On this Mrs. Laura must break out in quite a petulant tone—“Oh, how _stale_ this kind of thing is, Arthur, from a man _qui veut passer pour un homme d’esprit_! You are always attacking mothers-in-law!” “Witness Mrs. Mackenzie, my love—Clive Newcome’s mother-in-law. That’s a nice creature; not selfish, not wicked, not——” “Not nonsense, Arthur!” “Mrs. Baynes knew Mrs. Mackenzie in the West Indies, as she knew all the female army. She considers Mrs. Mackenzie was a most elegant, handsome, dashing woman—only a little too fond of the admiration of our sex. There was, I own, a fascination about Captain Goby. Do you remember, my love, that man with the stays and dyed hair, who——” “Oh, Arthur! When our girls marry, I suppose you will teach their husbands to abuse, and scorn, and mistrust _their_ mother-in-law. Will he, my darlings? will he, my blessings?” (This apart to the children, if you please.) “Go! I have no patience with such talk!” “Well, my love, Mrs. Baynes is a most agreeable woman; and when I have heard that story about the Highlanders at the Cape of Good Hope a few times more” (I do not tell it here, for it has nothing to do with the present history), “I daresay I shall begin to be amused by it.” “Ah! here comes Charlotte, I’m glad to say. How pretty she is! What a colour! What a dear creature!”