When the honorable and gallant baronet, her father, died, he left the widowed Lady Malkinshaw with her worldly affairs in a curiously involved state.

Her son (of whom I feel truly ashamed to be obliged to speak again so soon) made an effort to extricate his mother--involved himself in a series of pecuniary disasters, which commercial people call, I believe, transactions--struggled for a little while to get out of them in the character of an independent gentleman--failed--and then spiritlessly availed himself of the oleaginous refuge of the soap and candle trade.

His mother always looked down upon him after this; but borrowed money of him also--in order to show, I suppose, that her maternal interest in her son was not quite extinct.

My father tried to follow her example--in his wife's interests, of course; but the soap-boiler brutally buttoned up his pockets, and told my father to go into business for himself.

Thus it happened that we were certainly a poor family, in spite of the fine appearance we made, the fashionable street we lived in, the neat brougham we kept, and the clumsy and expensive footman who answered our door.
What was to be done with me in the way of education?
If my father had consulted his means, I should have been sent to a cheap commercial academy; but he had to consult his relationship to Lady Malkinshaw; so I was sent to one of the most fashionable and famous of the great public schools.