The Way of all Flesh by Samuel Butler

I had called on Ernest as a matter of course when he first came to London, but had not seen him. I had been out when he returned my call, so that he had been in town for some weeks before I actually saw him, which I did not very long after he had taken possession of his new rooms. I liked his face, but except for the common bond of music, in respect of which our tastes were singularly alike, I should hardly have known how to get on with him. To do him justice he did not air any of his schemes to me until I had drawn him out concerning them. I, to borrow the words of Ernest's landlady, Mrs. Jupp, "am not a very regular churchgoer" -- I discovered upon cross-examination that Mrs. Jupp had been to church once when she was churched for her son Tom some five and twenty years since, but never either before or afterwards; not even, I fear, to be married, for though she called herself "Mrs. " she wore no wedding ring, and spoke of the person who should have been Mr. Jupp as "my poor dear boy's father," not as "my husband. " But to return. I was vexed at Ernest's having been ordained. I was not ordained myself and I did not like my friends to be ordained, nor did I like having to be on my best behaviour and to look as if butter would not melt in my mouth, and all for a boy whom I remembered when he knew yesterday and tomorrow and Tuesday, but not a day of the week more -- not even Sunday itself -- and when he said he did not like the kitten because it had pins in its toes.

I looked at him and thought of his aunt Alethea, and how fast the money she had left him was accumulating; and it was all to go to this young man, who would use it probably in the very last ways with which Miss Pontifex would have sympathised. I was annoyed. "She always said," I thought to myself, "that she should make a mess of it, but I did not think she would have made as great a mess of it as this. " Then I thought that perhaps if his aunt had lived he would not have been like this.