The admiral was a man who liked whist,
wine--and wickedness in general we may perhaps say, and whose ambition it
was to live every day of his life up to the end of it. People say that he
succeeded, and that the whist, wine, and wickedness were there, at the
side even of his dying bed. He had no particular fortune, and yet his
daughter, when she was little more than a child, went about everywhere
with jewels on her fingers, and red gems hanging round her neck, and
yellow gems pendent from her ears, and white gems shining in her black
hair. She was hardly nineteen when her father died and she was taken home
by that dreadful old termagant, her aunt, Lady Linlithgow. Lizzie would
have sooner gone to any other friend or relative, had there been any other
friend or relative to take her possessed of a house in town. Her uncle,
Dean Greystock, of Bobsborough, would have had her--and a more good-
natured old soul than the dean's wife did not exist, and there were three
pleasant, good-tempered girls in the deanery, who had made various little
efforts at friendship with their cousin Lizzie--but Lizzie had higher
ideas for herself than life in the deanery at Bobsborough.
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