had married, and taken rooms, and lived very comfortably
till Jim was three or four years old. But the taste for liquor was too
strong; and long days in fog and rain, chilled to the marrow under the
swollen gray clouds of the London winter, were some excuse for the rush
to the "public" at the end of each trip. The day's wages at last were
all swallowed, and the wife, like a good proportion of workmen's wives,
found herself chief bread-winner, and tried first one trade and then
another, till Nelly's quick fingers grew serviceable.

Nelly was pretty,--more than pretty. Even Jim had moments of admiration;
and the Buildings, in which several of her admirers lived, had seen
unending fights as to who had the best right to take her out on Sundays.
Her waving red-brown hair, her great eyes matching it in tint to a
shade, her long black lashes and delicate brows, the low white forehead
and clear pale cheeks,--anybody could see that these were far and away
beyond any girl in the Buildings. The lips were too full, and the nose
no particular shape; but the quick-moving, slender figure, like her
mother's, and the delicate hands, which Nelly hated to soil, and kept as
carefully as possible,--all these were indications over which the women,
in conclave over tea and shrimps, shook their heads.

"'Er father was a gentleman, that's plain to see. She'll go the same
way her mother did. I'd not 'ave one of my hown boys take up with her,
not for no money."

This seemed the general verdict in the Buildings; and though Nelly sewed
steadily all day and every day, the women still held to it, the men
hotly contesting it, and family quarrels over the subject confirming the
impression. Nelly worked on, however, unmoved by criticism or approval,
spending all that could be saved from the housekeeping on the most
stylish clothes to be found in Petticoat Lane market, and denying
herself even in these for the sake of a little hoard, which accumulated,
oh! so slowly since it had been broken into, once for a new feather for
her little hat, once for a day's pleasuring at Greenwich; and Nelly
resolved firmly it should never happen again.

One ambition filled her. This hateful East End must be left somehow.
Somehow she must get to be the lady which she felt sure she ought to be.
There were hints of this sometimes in her mother's talk; but it was
plain that there was nobody to help her to this but herself. Already
Jim drank more than his share. He was goi