tues. She made an
arrangement, therefore, with her father, that they two would keep
house together in London, and so they had lived for the last five
years;--for Alice Vavasor when she will be introduced to the reader
had already passed her twenty-fourth birthday.

Their mode of life had been singular and certainly not in all
respects satisfactory. Alice when she was twenty-one had the full
command of her own fortune; and when she induced her father, who for
the last fifteen years had lived in lodgings, to take a small house
in Queen Anne Street, of course she offered to incur a portion of
the expense. He had warned her that his habits were not those of a
domestic man, but he had been content simply so to warn her. He had
not felt it to be his duty to decline the arrangement because he knew
himself to be unable to give to his child all that attention which
a widowed father under such circumstances should pay to an only
daughter. The house had been taken, and Alice and he had lived
together, but their lives had been quite apart. For a short time, for
a month or two, he had striven to dine at home and even to remain at
home through the evening; but the work had been too hard for him and
he had utterly broken down. He had said to her and to himself that
his health would fail him under the effects of so great a change made
so late in life, and I am not sure that he had not spoken truly. At
any rate the effort had been abandoned, and Mr Vavasor now never
dined at home. Nor did he and his daughter ever dine out together.
Their joint means did not admit of their giving dinners, and
therefore they could not make their joint way in the same circle. It
thus came to pass that they lived apart,--quite apart. They saw each
other, probably daily; but they did little more than see each other.
They did not even breakfast together, and after three o'clock in the
day Mr Vavasor was never to be found in his own house.

Miss Vavasor had made for herself a certain footing in society,
though I am disposed to doubt her right to be considered as holding
a place among the Upper Ten Thousand. Two classes of people she had
chosen to avoid, having been driven to such avoidings by her aunt's
preferences; marquises and such-like, whether wicked or otherwise,
she had eschewed, and had eschewed likewise all Low Church
tendencies. The eschewing of marquises is not generally very
difficult. Young ladies living with their fathers on very moderate
inco