She fully understood the cause of the deference which all the Castlewood family showed to her--mother, and daughter, and sons,--and being a woman of great humour, played upon the dispositions of the various members of this family, amused herself with their greedinesses, their humiliations, their artless respect for her money-box, and clinging attachment to her purse.
They were not very rich; Lady Castlewood's own money was settled on her children.

The two elder had inherited nothing but flaxen heads from their German mother, and a pedigree of prodigious distinction.

But those who had money, and those who had none, were alike eager for the Baroness's; in this matter the rich are surely quite as greedy as the poor.
So if Madam Bernstein struck her hand on the table, and caused the glasses and the persons round it to tremble at her wrath, it was because she was excited with plenty of punch and champagne, which her ladyship was in the habit of taking freely, and because she may have had a generous impulse when generous wine warmed her blood, and felt indignant as she thought of the poor lad yonder, sitting friendless and lonely on the outside of his ancestors' door; not because she was specially angry with her relatives, who she knew would act precisely as they had done.
The exhibition of their selfishness and humiliation alike amused her, as did Castlewood's act of revolt.

He was as selfish as the rest of the family, but not so mean; and, as he candidly stated, he could afford the luxury of a little independence, having tolerable estate to fall back upon.
Madam Bernstein was an early woman, restless, resolute, extraordinarily active for her age.

She was up long before the languid Castlewood ladies (just home from their London routs and balls) had quitted their feather-beds, or jolly Will had slept off his various potations of punch.