when bathing disagreed, the sea breeze was evidently
designed by nature for the cure. His eloquence, however, could not
prevail. Mr. and Mrs. Heywood never left home. . . . The maintenance,
education, and fitting out of fourteen children demanded a very quiet,
settled, careful course of life; and obliged them to be stationary and
healthy at Willingden. What prudence had at first enjoined was now
rendered pleasant by habit. They never left home, and they had a
gratification in saying so.'

Lady Denham's was a very different character. She was a rich vulgar
widow, with a sharp but narrow mind, who cared for the prosperity of
Sanditon only so far as it might increase the value of her own property.
She is thus described:--

'Lady Denham had been a rich Miss Brereton, born to wealth, but not to
education. Her first husband had been a Mr. Hollis, a man of
considerable property in the country, of which a large share of the
parish of Sanditon, with manor and mansion-house, formed a part. He had
been an elderly man when she married him; her own age about thirty. Her
motives for such a match could be little understood at the distance of
forty years, but she had so well nursed and pleased Mr. Hollis that at
his death he left her everything--all his estates, and all at her
disposal. After a widowhood of some years she had been induced to marry
again. The late Sir Harry Denham, of Denham Park, in the neighbourhood
of Sanditon, succeeded in removing her and her large income to his own
domains; but he could not succeed in the views of permanently enriching
his family which were attributed to him. She had been too wary to put
anything out of her own power, and when, on Sir Harry's death, she
returned again to her own house at Sanditon, she was said to have made
this boast, "that though she had _got_ nothing but her title from the
family, yet she had _given_ nothing for it." For the title it was to be
supposed that she married.

'Lady Denham was indeed a great lady, beyond the common wants of society;
for she had many thousands a year to bequeath, and three distinct sets of
people to be courted by:--her own relations, who might very reasonably
wish for her original thirty thousand pounds among them; the legal heirs
of Mr. Hollis, who might hope to be more indebted to _her_ sense of
justice than he had allowed them to be to _his_; and those members of the
Denham family for whom her second husband had hoped to make a good