I have known them produce a great deal of
unhappiness.--Laura's father, my cousin, who--who was brought up with
me"--she added, in a low voice, "was an instance of that."

"Most injudicious," cut in the Major. "I don't know anything more
painful than for a man to marry his superior in age or his inferior in
station. Fancy marrying a woman of low rank of life, and having your
house filled with her confounded tag-rag-and-bobtail of relations! Fancy
your wife attached to a mother who dropped her h's, or called Maria
Marire! How are you to introduce her into society? My dear Mrs.
Pendennis, I will name no names, but in the very best circles of London
society I have seen men suffering the most excruciating agony, I have
known them to be cut, to be lost utterly, from the vulgarity of their
wives' connections. What did Lady Snapperton do last year at her dejeune
dansant after the Bohemian Ball? She told Lord Brouncker that he might
bring his daughters or send them with a proper chaperon, but that she
would not receive Lady Brouncker who was a druggist's daughter, or
some such thing, and as Tom Wagg remarked of her, never wanted medicine
certainly, for she never had an h in her life. Good Ged, what would
have been the trifling pang of a separation in the first instance to the
enduring infliction of a constant misalliance and intercourse with low
people?"

"What, indeed!" said Helen, dimly disposed towards laughter, but yet
checking the inclination, because she remembered in what prodigious
respect her deceased husband held Major Pendennis and his stories of the
great world.

"Then this fatal woman is ten years older than that silly young
scapegrace of an Arthur. What happens in such cases, my dear creature?
I don't mind telling you, now we are alone that in the highest state
of society, misery, undeviating misery, is the result. Look at Lord
Clodworthy come into a room with his wife--why, good Ged, she looks like
Clodworthy's mother. What's the case between Lord and Lady Willowbank,
whose love match was notorious? He has already cut her down twice
when she has hanged herself out of jealousy for Mademoiselle de Sainte
Cunegonde, the dancer; and mark my words, good Ged, one day he'll not
cut the old woman down. No, my dear madam, you are not in the world, but
I am: you are a little romantic and sentimental (you know you are--women
with those large beautiful eyes always are); you must leave this matter
to my experience. Marry t