“Yes. When it’s time to go back to Smithfield on a Sunday night, I go into the dining-room to shake hands, and he gives it me; but he don’t speak to me much, you know, and I don’t care about going to Bryanstone Square, except for the tip, of course that’s important, because I am made to dine with the children, and they are quite little ones; and a great cross French governess, who is always crying and shrieking after them, and finding fault with them. My uncle generally has his dinner-parties on Saturday, or goes out; and aunt gives me ten shillings and sends me to the play; that’s better fun than a dinner-party.” Here the lad blushed again. “I used,” says he, “when I was younger, to stand on the stairs and prig things out of the dishes when they came out from dinner, but I’m past that now. Maria (that’s my cousin) used to take the sweet things and give ’em to the governess. Fancy! she used to put lumps of sugar into her pocket and eat them in the schoolroom! Uncle Hobson don’t live in such good society as Uncle Newcome. You see, Aunt Hobson, she’s very kind, you know, and all that, but I don’t think she’s what you call _comme il faut_.” “Why, how are you to judge?” asks the father, amused at the lad’s candid prattle, “and where does the difference lie?” “I can’t tell you what it is, or how it is,” the boy answered, “only one can’t help seeing the difference. It isn’t rank and that; only somehow there are some men gentlemen and some not, and some women ladies and some not. There’s Jones now, the fifth form master, every man sees _he’s_ a gentleman, though he wears ever so old clothes; and there’s Mr. Brown, who oils his hair, and wears rings, and white chokers—my eyes! such white chokers!—and yet we call him the handsome snob! And so about Aunt Maria, she’s very handsome and she’s very finely dressed, only somehow she’s not—she’s not the ticket, you see.” “Oh, she’s not the ticket,” says the Colonel, much amused. “Well, what I mean is—but never mind,” says the boy. “I can’t tell you what I mean. I don’t like to make fun of her, you know, for after all, she is very kind to me; but Aunt Anne is different, and it seems as if what she says is more natural; and though she has funny ways of her own too, yet somehow she looks grander,”—and here the lad laughed again. “And do you know, I often think that as good a lady as Aunt Anne herself, is old Aunt Honeyman at Brighton—that is, in all essentials, you know. For she is not proud, and she is not vain, and she never says an unkind word behind anybody’s back, and she does a deal of kindness to the poor without appearing to crow over them, you know; and she is not a bit ashamed of letting lodgings, or being poor herself, as sometimes I think some of our family——” “I thought we were going to speak no ill of them?” says the Colonel, smiling.