After short reflection he decided to take and furnish the rooms.

It proved a most fortunate step, for he lived (after the outlay for furniture) at much less expense than theretofore, and in comparative luxury.

Cleanliness, neatness, good taste by no means exhausted Mrs.Button's virtues; her cooking seemed to the lodger of incredible perfection, and the infinite goodwill with which he was tended made strange contrast with the base usage he had commonly experienced.
In these ten years he had paid but four visits to Twybridge, each of brief duration.

Naturally there were changes among his kinsfolk: Charlotte, after an engagement which prolonged itself to the fifth twelvemonth, had become Mrs.Cusse, and her husband now had a draper's shop of his own, with two children already born into the world of draperdom.

Oliver, twice fruitlessly affianced, had at length (when six-and-twenty) wedded a young person whom his mother and his aunt both regarded as a most undesirable connection, the daughter (aged thirty-two) of a man who was drinking himself to death on such money as he could earn by casual reporting for a Twybridge newspaper.