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  5 With all this, she, the elder of the sisters, was not yet twenty,
and they had both been educated, since they were about twelve years old
and had lost their parents, on plans at once narrow and promiscuous,
first in an English family and afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne,
their bachelor uncle and guardian trying in this way to remedy the
disadvantages of their orphaned condition.
It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grange
with their uncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper,
miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote. He had travelled
in his younger years, and was held in this part of the county
to have contracted a too rambling habit of mind. Mr. Brooke's
conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather: it was
only safe to say that he would act with benevolent intentions,
and that he would spend as little money as possible in carrying
them out. For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some
hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his
own interests except the retention of his snuff-box, concerning
which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.
In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly
in abeyance; but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults
and virtues, turning sometimes into impatience of her uncle's talk
or his way of "letting things be" on his estate, and making her long
all the more for the time when she would be of age and have some
command of money for generous schemes. She was regarded as an heiress;
for not only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from
their parents, but if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would
inherit Mr. Brooke's estate, presumably worth about three thousand
a-year--a rental which seemed wealth to provincial families,
still discussing Mr. Peel's late conduct on the Catholic question,
innocent of future gold-fields, and of that gorgeous plutocracy
which has so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life.
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