idea that I, as a member of the male British
aristocracy, was dissolute--it was an article of faith with her--that
warmth of sentiment would bring a faint, sympathetic rosiness to her
sunken cheeks.

She said suddenly and trembling, "Oh, young sir, reflect upon these
things before it is too late. You young men, in your luxurious, worldly,
ungoverned lives..."

I shall never forget that first talk with her on the poop--her hurried,
nervous voice (for she was a timid woman, speaking from a sense of
duty), and the extravagant forms her ignorance took. With the emotions
of the past night still throbbing in my brain and heart, with the sight
of the sea and the coast, with the Rio Medio schooner hanging on our
quarter, I listened to her, and had a hard task to believe my ears.
She was so convinced that I was "dissolute," because of my class--as an
earl's grandson.

It is difficult to imagine how she arrived at the conviction; it must
have been from pulpit denunciations of the small Bethel on the outskirt
of Bristol. Her uncle, J. Perkins, was a great ruffian, certainly,
and Williams was dissolute enough, if one wished to call his festive
imbecilities by a hard name. But these two could, by no means, be said
to belong to the upper classes. And these two, apart from her favourite
preacher, were the only two men of whom she could be said to have more
than a visual knowledge.

She had spent her best years in domestic slavery to her bachelor uncle,
an old shipowner of savage selfishness; she had been the deplorable
mistress of his big, half-furnished house, standing in a damp garden
full of trees. The outrageous Perkins had been a sailor in his
time--mate of a privateer in the great French war, afterwards master
of a slaver, developing at last into the owner of a small fleet of West
Indiamen. Williams was his favourite captain, whom he would bring home
in the evening to drink rum and water, and smoke churchwarden pipes with
him. The niece had to sit up, too, at these dismal revels. Old Perkins
would keep her out of bed to mix the grogs, till he was ready to climb
the bare stone staircase, echoing from top to bottom with his stumbles.
However, it seems he dozed a good deal in snatches during the
evening, and this, I suppose, gave their opportunity to the pale,
spiritual-looking spinster with the patient eyes, and to the thick,
staring Williams, florid with good living, and utterly unused to the
company of women of that sort.