Personality

Then a hero would have had to wonder what to do next. Eight hundred years had taught Lu-Tze that what happens stays happened. It might stay happened in a different set of dimensions, if you wanted to get technical, but you couldn’t make it un-happen. The clock had struck, and time had stopped. Later, a solution would present itself. In the meantime, a cup of tea and conversation with his serendipitous rescuer might speed that time. After all, Ronnie was not your average milkman.

History

When he was a little boy, Sam Vimes had thought that the very rich ate off gold plates and lived in marble houses.

He’d learned something new: the very VERY rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very old furniture, covered in dust sheets.

Later Years

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. […] The mansion was was full of this big, solid furniture, bought by her ancestors. It never wore out. She had whole boxes full of jewellery which just seemed to have accumulated over the centuries. Vimes had seen a wine cellar that a regiment of speleologists could get so happily drunk in that they wouldn’t mind that they’d got lost without a trace.

Lady Sybil Ramkin lived quite comfortably from day to day by spending, Vimes estimated, about half as much as he did.

Trivia

• You ought to ask magical Mr. Mistoffolees, the original conjuring cat. There can be no doubt about that.
• All of his inventions are off his own bat.
• There's no such cat in the metropolis. He holds all the patent monopolies for performing surprising illusions.
• The greatest magicians have something to learn from Mr. Mistoffolees' conjuring turn.
• You see it one moment, but then - it is gone! But you'll find it next week, laying out on the lawn.

Aesthetics