“I suppose you’re a young barrister, sucking lawyer, or that sort of thing. Because you was put at the end of the table and nobody took notice of you. That’s my place too; I’m a relative and Newcome asks me if he has got a place to spare. He met me in the City to-day, and says, ‘Tom,’ says he, ‘there’s some dinner in the Square at half-past seven: I wish you would go and fetch Louisa, whom we haven’t seen this ever so long.’ Louisa is my wife, sir—Maria’s sister—Newcome married that gal from my house. ‘No, no,’ says I, ‘Hobson; Louisa’s engaged nursing number eight’—that’s our number, sir. The truth is, between you and me, sir, my missis won’t come any more at no price. She can’t stand it; Mrs. Newcome’s dam patronising airs is enough to choke off anybody. ‘Well, Hobson, my boy,’ says I, ‘a good dinner’s a good dinner; and I’ll come though Louisa won’t, that is, can’t.’” While Mr. Giles, who was considerably enlivened by claret, was discoursing thus candidly, his companion was thinking how he, Mr. Arthur Pendennis, had been met that very afternoon on the steps of the Megatherium Club by Mr. Newcome, and had accepted that dinner which Mrs. Giles, with more spirit, had declined. Giles continued talking—“I’m an old stager, I am. I don’t mind the rows between the women. I believe Mrs. Newcome and Lady Newcome’s just as bad too; I know Maria is always driving at her one way or the other, and calling her proud and aristocratic, and that; and yet my wife says Maria, who pretends to be such a Radical, never asks us to meet the Baronet and his lady. ‘And why should she, Loo, my dear?’ says I. ‘I don’t want to meet Lady Newcome, nor Lord Kew, nor any of ’em.’ Lord Kew, ain’t it an odd name? Tearing young swell, that Lord Kew: tremendous wild fellow.” “I was a clerk in that house, sir, as a young man; I was there in the old woman’s time, and Mr. Newcome’s—the father of these young men—as good a man as ever stood on ’Change.” And then Mr. Giles, warming with his subject, enters at large into the history of the house. “You see, sir,” says he, “the banking-house of Hobson Brothers, or Newcome Brothers, as the partners of the firm really are, is not one of the leading banking firms of the City of London, but a most respectable house of many years’ standing, and doing a most respectable business, especially in the Dissenting connection.” After the business came into the hands of the Newcome Brothers, Hobson Newcome, Esq., and Sir Brian Newcome, Bart., M.P., Mr. Giles shows how a considerable West End connection was likewise established, chiefly through the aristocratic friends and connections of the above-named Bart.