"Jacky could not come with you?"

"No, and he writes bitterly about it. He is tied to Oxford--by lack
of pence, again."

By this time Charles had slipped on his jacket, and the pair stepped
out into the streets and set their faces eastward. Mrs. Wesley was
cockney-bred and delighted in the stir and rush of life. She, the
mother of many children, kept a well-poised figure and walked with
the elastic step of a maid; and as she went she chatted, asking a
score of shrewd questions about Westminster--the masters, the food,
the old dormitory in which Charles slept, the new one then rising to
replace it; breaking off to recognise some famous building, or to
pause and gaze after a company of his Majesty's guards. Her own
masterful carriage and unembarrassed mode of speech--"as if all
London belonged to her," Charles afterwards described it--drew the
stares of the passers-by; stares which she misinterpreted, for in the
gut of the Strand, a few paces beyond Somerset House, she suddenly
twirled the lad about and "Bless us, child, your eye's enough to
frighten the town! 'Tis to be hoped brother Sam has not turned
Quaker in India; or that Sally the cook-maid has a beefsteak handy."

Mr. Matthew Wesley, apothecary and by courtesy "surgeon," to whose
house in Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, they presently swerved aside,
had not returned from his morning's round of visits. He was a
widower and took his meals irregularly. But Sally had two covers
laid, with a pot of freshly drawn porter beside each; and here, after
Charles's eye had been attended to and the swelling reduced, they ate
and drank and rested for half an hour before resuming their walk.