You would not think it when you saw her big carriage rattling up to the
drawing-room, and caught a glimpse of her plumes, lappets, and diamonds,
waving over her ladyship's sandy hair and majestical hooked nose;--you
would not think it when you hear 'Lady Susan Scraper's carriage' bawled
out at midnight so as to disturb all Belgravia:--you would not think it
when she comes rustling into church, the obsequious John behind with the
bag of Prayer-books. Is it possible, you would say, that so grand and
awful a personage as that can be hard-up for money? Alas! So it is.
She never heard such a word as Snob, I will engage, in this wicked and
vulgar world. And, O stars and garters! how she would start if she heard
that she--she, as solemn as Minerva--she, as chaste as Diana (without
that heathen goddess's unladylike propensity for field-sports)--that she
too was a Snob!
A Snob she is, as long as she sets that prodigious value upon herself,
upon her name, upon her outward appearance, and indulges in that
intolerable pomposity; as long as she goes parading abroad, like
Solomon in all his glory; as long as she goes to bed--as I believe she
does--with a turban and a bird of paradise in it, and a court train
to her night-gown; as long as she is so insufferably virtuous and
condescending; as long as she does not cut at least one of those footmen
down into mutton-chops for the benefit of the young ladies.
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