Like many a worse person, she was a little bit capricious, and a good deal selfish; but the young fellow was handsome.

She was proud of his singularly good looks, and his wickedness interested her, and she gave him more money than to all the best public charities to which she contributed put together.

Devereux, indeed, being a fast man, with such acres as he inherited, which certainly did not reach a thousand, mortgaged pretty smartly, and with as much personal debt beside, of the fashionable and refined sort, as became a young buck of bright though doubtful expectations--and if the truth must be owned, sometimes pretty nearly pushed into a corner--was beholden, not only for his fun, but, occasionally for his daily bread and even his liberty, to those benevolent doles.
He did not like her peremptory summons; but he could not afford to quarrel with his bread and butter, nor to kill by undutiful behaviour the fair, plump bird whose golden eggs were so very convenient.

I don't know whether there may not have been some slight sign in the handwriting--in a phrase, perhaps, or in the structure of the composition, which a clever analysis might have detected, and which only reached him vaguely, with a foreboding that he was not to see Chapelizod again so soon as usual when this trip was made.

And, in truth, his aunt had plans.