and successful warfare with Ellen to extend the sympathy and make the
inquiries which I suppose I ought to have made. And yet I hardly know
what I could have done, for nothing short of his finding out what he had
found out would have detached him from his wife, and nothing could do him
much good as long as he continued to live with her.

After all I suppose I was right; I suppose things did turn out all the
better in the end for having been left to settle themselves--at any rate
whether they did or did not, the whole thing was in too great a muddle
for me to venture to tackle it so long as Ellen was upon the scene; now,
however, that she was removed, all my interest in my godson revived, and
I turned over many times in my mind, what I had better do with him.

It was now three and a half years since he had come up to London and
begun to live, so to speak, upon his own account. Of these years, six
months had been spent as a clergyman, six months in gaol, and for two and
a half years he had been acquiring twofold experience in the ways of
business and of marriage. He had failed, I may say, in everything that
he had undertaken, even as a prisoner; yet his defeats had been always,
as it seemed to me, something so like victories, that I was satisfied of
his being worth all the pains I could bestow upon him; my only fear was
lest I should meddle with him when it might be better for him to be let
alone. On the whole I concluded that a three and a half years'
apprenticeship to a rough life was enough; the shop had done much for
him; it had kept him going after a fashion, when he was in great need; it
had thrown him upon his own resources, and taught him to see profitable
openings all around him, where a few months before he would have seen
nothing but insuperable difficulties; it had enlarged his sympathies by
making him understand the lower classes, and not confining his view of
life to that taken by gentlemen only. When he went about the streets and
saw the books outside the second-hand book-stalls, the bric-a-brac in the
curiosity shops, and the infinite commercial activity which is
omnipresent around us, he understood it and sympathised with it as he
could never have done if he had not kept a shop himself.

He has often told me that when he used to travel on a railway that
overlooked populous suburbs, and looked down upon street after street of
dingy houses, he used to wonder what kind of people lived in them, what
t