It was on a Friday evening, an inauspicious Friday, that poor Ruby¹ Ruggles had insisted on leaving the security of her Aunt Pipkin’s house with her aristocratic and vicious lover, in spite of the positive assurance made to her by Mrs Pipkin that if she went forth² in such company she should not be allowed to return. ‘Of course you must let her in,’ Mrs Hurtle had said soon after the girl’s departure. Whereupon Mrs Pipkin had cried. She knew her own softness too well to suppose it to be possible that she could keep the girl out in the streets all night; but yet it was hard upon her, very hard, that she should be so troubled. ‘We usen’t to have our ways like that when I was young,’ she said, sobbing³. What was to be the end of it? Was she to be forced by circumstances to keep the girl always there, let the girl’s conduct be what it might? Nevertheless she acknowledged that Ruby must be let in when she came back. Then, about nine o’clock, John Crumb⁴ came; and the latter part of the evening was more melancholy⁵ even than the first. It was impossible to conceal⁶ the truth from John Crumb. Mrs Hurtle saw the poor man and told the story in Mrs Pipkin’s presence.

‘She’s headstrong, Mr Crumb,’ said Mrs Hurtle.

‘She is that, ma’am. And it was along wi’ the baronite she went?’

‘It was so, Mr Crumb.’

‘Baro-nite! Well; — perhaps I shall catch him some of these days; — went to dinner wi’ him, did she? Didn’t she have no dinner here?’

Then Mrs Pipkin spoke⁷ up with a keen sense of offence. Ruby Ruggles had had as wholesome⁸ a dinner as any young woman in London — a bullock’s heart and potatoes — just as much as ever she had pleased to eat of it. Mrs Pipkin could tell Mr Crumb that there was ‘no starvation nor yet no

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