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,"