Sink or Swim? , Volume II

When blustering March was over, and the dead season of the year had been for rich, as well as poor, got through, the widow of the lamented Cecil Vavasour commenced -- for the first time since his death -- making preparations for a three-months' sojourn in London, or, as the newspapers expressed it, "Lady Millicent Vavasour, her family and suite, were about, during the ensuing season, to occupy the mansion in Bolton-square, to her ladyship belonging."

In the course of the six years that Lady Millicent had passed in a seclusion which she had not attempted to render otherwise than irksome to her daughters, the above-named mansion had been let -- as each revolving season came round -- to the highest bidder. It was not a very dignified proceeding, and her children (her sons especially) had chafed both inwardly and outwardly against what _they_ considered their mother's "dirty economy," in thus making money out of the family bricks and mortar. The tide of public opinion in London, as well as in the country, set strongly against the wealthy, parsimonious widow, whose accumulated riches benefited so few of the persons whom common sense, as well as the laws of nature and of precedent, pointed out as amongst those destined to reap advantage from the seed scattered by Lady Millicent's hand; while, as regarded her ladyship's sons, it was a melancholy fact, that for lack of a home, humanly speaking, those young gentlemen had in their nonage gone a good deal, as the saying is, "to the bad."