If one is to love a girl, it's no good one going on in that way!" "It isn't much good, certainly," said Johnny Eames.

And then they reached the door of the Income-tax Office, and each went away to his own desk.
From this little dialogue, it may be imagined that though Mrs Roper was as good as her word, she was not exactly the woman whom Mrs Eames would have wished to select as a protecting angel for her son.

But the truth I take to be this, that protecting angels for widows' sons, at forty-eight pounds a year, paid quarterly, are not to be found very readily in London.

Mrs Roper was not worse than others of her class.

She would much have preferred lodgers who were respectable to those who were not so,--if she could only have found respectable lodgers as she wanted them.