lege talks about you still," said Pen, who had a generous
admiration for talent and pluck. "The bargeman you thrashed, Bill Simes,
don't you remember, wants you up again at Oxbridge. The Miss Notleys,
the haberdashers----"

"Hush!" said Warrington--"glad to make your acquaintance, Pendennis.
Heard a good deal about you."

The young men were friends immediately, and at once deep in
college-talk. And Pen, who had been acting rather the fine gentleman on
a previous day, when he pretended to Lowton that he could not drink port
wine at dinner, seeing Warrington take his share with a great deal of
gusto, did not scruple about helping himself any more, rather to the
disappointment of honest Lowton. When the dinner was over, Warrington
asked Arthur where he was going.

"I thought of going home to dress, and hear Grisi in Norma," Pen said.

"Are you going to meet anybody there?" he asked.

Pen said, "No--only to hear the music," of which he was fond.

"You had much better come home and smoke a pipe with me," said
Warrington,--"a very short one. Come, I live close by in Lamb Court, and
we'll talk over Boniface and old times."

They went away; Lowton sighed after them. He knew Warrington was
a baronet's son, and he looked up with simple reverence to all the
aristocracy. Pen and Warrington became sworn friends from that night.
Warrington's cheerfulness and jovial temper, his good sense, his rough
welcome, and his never-failing pipe of tobacco, charmed Pen, who found
it more pleasant to dive into shilling taverns with him, than to dine
in solitary state amongst the silent and polite frequenters of the
Polyanthus.

Ere long Pen gave up the lodgings in St. James's, to which he had
migrated on quitting his hotel, and found it was much more economical to
take up his abode with Warrington in Lamb Court, and furnish and occupy
his friend's vacant room there. For it must be said of Pen, that no man
was more easily led than he to do a thing, when it was a novelty, or
when he had a mind to it. And Pidgeon, the youth, and Flanagan, the
laundress, divided their allegiance now between Warrington and Pen.

CHAPTER XXXI. Old and new Acquaintances

Elated with the idea of seeing life, Pen went into a hundred queer
London haunts. He liked to think he was consorting with all sorts
of men--so he beheld coalheavers in their tap-rooms; boxers in their
inn-parlours; honest citizens disporting in the suburbs or on the river;
and he wo