is to love a girl, it's no good one going on in that way!"

"It isn't much good, certainly," said Johnny Eames. And then they
reached the door of the Income-tax Office, and each went away to his
own desk.

From this little dialogue, it may be imagined that though Mrs Roper
was as good as her word, she was not exactly the woman whom Mrs Eames
would have wished to select as a protecting angel for her son. But
the truth I take to be this, that protecting angels for widows' sons,
at forty-eight pounds a year, paid quarterly, are not to be found
very readily in London. Mrs Roper was not worse than others of her
class. She would much have preferred lodgers who were respectable
to those who were not so,--if she could only have found respectable
lodgers as she wanted them. Mr and Mrs Lupex hardly came under that
denomination; and when she gave them up her big front bedroom at a
hundred a year, she knew she was doing wrong. And she was troubled,
too, about her own daughter Amelia, who was already over thirty years
of age. Amelia was a very clever young woman, who had been, if the
truth must be told, first young lady at a millinery establishment in
Manchester. Mrs Roper knew that Mrs Eames and Mrs Cradell would not
wish their sons to associate with her daughter. But what could she
do? She could not refuse the shelter of her own house to her own
child, and yet her heart misgave her when she saw Amelia flirting
with young Eames.

"I wish, Amelia, you wouldn't have so much to say to that young man."

"Laws, mother."