the Fancy Bazaar,
and the Great Missionary Meeting, about the last new novel, and the
Bishop's excellent sermon about the fashionable parties in London, an
account of which he read in the newspapers--in fine, he neglected
no art, by which a College divine who has both sprightly and serious
talents, a taste for the genteel, an irreproachable conduct, and a
susceptible heart, will try and make himself agreeable to the person on
whom he has fixed his affections.

Major Pendennis came yawning out of the dining-room very soon after his
sister and little Laura had left the apartment. "What an unsufferable
bore that man is, and how he did talk!" the Major said.

"He has been very good to Arthur, who is very fond of him," Mrs.
Pendennis said,--"I wonder who the Miss Thompson is whom he is going to
marry?"

"I always thought the fellow was looking in another direction," said the
Major.

"And in what?" asked Mrs. Pendennis quite innocently,--"towards Myra
Portman?"

"Towards Helen Pendennis, if you must know," answered her
brother-in-law.

"Towards me! impossible!" Helen said, who knew perfectly well that such
had been the case. "His marriage will be a very happy thing. I hope
Arthur will not take too much wine."

Now Arthur, flushed with a good deal of pride at the privilege of having
the keys of the cellar, and remembering that a very few more dinners
would probably take place which he and his dear friend Smirke could
share, had brought up a liberal supply of claret for the company's
drinking, and when the elders with little Laura left him, he and the
Curate began to pass the wine very freely.

One bottle speedily yielded up the ghost, another shed more than half
its blood, before the two topers had been much more than half an hour
together--Pen, with a hollow laugh and voice, had drunk off one bumper
to the falsehood of women, and had said sardonically, that wine at any
rate was a mistress who never deceived, and was sure to give a man a
welcome.

Smirke gently said that he knew for his part some women who were all
truth and tenderness; and casting up his eyes towards the ceiling, and
heaving a sigh as if evoking some being dear and unmentionable, he took
up his glass and drained it, and the rosy liquor began to suffuse his
face.

Pen trolled over some verses he had been making that morning, in which
he informed himself that the woman who had slighted his passion could
not be worthy to win it: that he was awakin