Samuel Butler: The Way of All Flesh

71. CHAPTER LXXI (continued)

"I believe you are right, but I am no longer a gentleman, Ellen, and I don't see why I should be 'like that' any longer, my dear. I want you to help me to be like something else as soon as possible."

"Lor'! Master Ernest, whatever can you be meaning?"

The pair soon afterwards left the eating-house and walked up Fetter Lane together.

Ellen had had hard times since she had left Battersby, but they had left little trace upon her.

Ernest saw only the fresh-looking smiling face, the dimpled cheek, the clear blue eyes and lovely sphinx-like lips which he had remembered as a boy. At nineteen she had looked older than she was, now she looked much younger; indeed she looked hardly older than when Ernest had last seen her, and it would have taken a man of much greater experience than he possessed to suspect how completely she had fallen from her first estate. It never occurred to him that the poor condition of her wardrobe was due to her passion for ardent spirits, and that first and last she had served five or six times as much time in gaol as he had. He ascribed the poverty of her attire to the attempts to keep herself respectable, which Ellen during supper had more than once alluded to. He had been charmed with the way in which she had declared that a pint of beer would make her tipsy, and had only allowed herself to be forced into drinking the whole after a good deal of remonstrance. To him she appeared a very angel dropped from the sky, and all the more easy to get on with for being a fallen one.

As he walked up Fetter Lane with her towards Laystall Street, he thought of the wonderful goodness of God towards him in throwing in his way the very person of all others whom he was most glad to see, and whom, of all others, in spite of her living so near him, he might have never fallen in with but for a happy accident.