governess-pupil, had turned many a dun away from her father's door. She
had never been a girl, she said: she had been a woman since she was
eight years old.

At Russell Square Rebecca saw the two magnificent Cashmere shawls which
Joseph Sedley of the East India Company's Civil Service had brought home
to his sister, said with perfect truth that it must be delightful to
have a brother, and easily got the pity of the tender-hearted Amelia for
being alone in the world. A series of queries, addressed to her friend,
brought Rebecca, who was but nineteen, to the following conclusion:--"As
Mr. Joseph Sedley is rich and unmarried, why should I not marry him? I
have only a fortnight, to be sure, but there is no harm in trying." I
don't think we have any right to blame her, if Rebecca did not set her
heart upon the conquest of this beau, for she had no kind parents to
arrange these delicate matters for her.

But Mr. Joseph Sedley, greedy, vain, and cowardly, would not be brought
up to the sticking point. Young George Osborne, Captain of the --th, old
Sedley's godson, and the accepted lover of Amelia, thought Joseph was a
milksop. He turned over in his mind, as the Sedleys did, the possibility
of marriage between Joseph and Rebecca, and was not over well pleased
that a member of a family into which he, George Osborne, was going to
marry, should make a mesalliance with a little nobody--a little upstart
governess. "Hang it, the family's low enough already without _her_,"
Osborne said to his friend Captain Dobbin. "A governess is all very
well, but I'd rather have a lady for my sister-in-law. I'm a liberal
man; but I've proper pride, and know my own station: let her know hers.
And I'll take down that hectoring Nabob, and prevent him from being made
a greater fool than he is. That's why I told him to look out, lest she
brought an action against him."