She liked to sit lazily in her arm-chair while the two girls chattered at their work, and she could venture an occasional remark, and fancy that she had a full share in the conversation.

When the summer weather rendered walking a martyrdom and driving an affliction, she could recline on her favourite sofa reading a novel, soothed by the feeble twittering of her birds; while Charlotte and Diana went out together, protected by the smart boy in buttons, who was not altogether without human failings, and was apt to linger behind his fair charges, reading the boards before the doors of newsvendors' shops, or looking at the cartoons in _Punch_ exhibited in the stationers' windows.
Mr.Sheldon made a point of pleasing his stepdaughter whenever it was possible for him to do so without palpable inconvenience to himself; and as she was to be gratified by so small a pecuniary sacrifice as the trifling increase of tradesmen's bills caused by Miss Paget's residence in the gothic villa, he was the last man in the world to refuse her that indulgence.

His own pursuits were of so absorbing a nature as to leave little leisure for concern about other people's business.

He asked no questions about his stepdaughter's companion; but he was not the less surprised to see this beautiful high-bred woman content to sit at his board as an unsalaried dependent.
"Your friend Miss Paget looks like a countess," he said one day to Charlotte.

"I thought girls generally pitched upon some plain homely young woman for their pet companion, but you seem to have chosen the handsomest girl in the school." "Yes, she is very handsome, is she not?
I wish some of your rich City men would marry her, papa." Miss Halliday consented to call her mother's husband "papa," though the caressing name seemed in a manner to stick in her throat.