have no talents myself that I admire those who have. I felt a mournful
anxiety, too, for your poor little girl,--so young, so engaging. And is
it necessary that you should bring up that child in a course of life
certainly equivocal, and to females dangerous?"

The Comedian lifted his eyes suddenly, and stared hard at the face of his
visitor, and in that face there was so much of benevolent humanity, so
much sweetness contending with authoritative rebuke, that the vagabond's
hardihood gave way! He struck his breast, and groaned aloud.

MR. HARTOPP (pressing on the advantage he had gained).--"And have you no
alarm for her health? Do you not see how delicate she is? Do you not
see that her very talent comes from her susceptibility to emotions which
must wear her away?"

WAIFE.-"No, no! stop, stop, stop! you terrify me, you break my heart.
Man, man! it is all for her that I toil and show and beg,--if you call it
begging. Do you think I care what becomes of this battered hulk? Not a
straw. What am I to do? What! what! You tell me to confide in you;
wherefore? How can you help me? Would you give me employment? What am
I fit for? Nothing! You could find work and bread for an Irish
labourer, nor ask who or what he was; but to a man who strays towards
you, seemingly from a sphere in which, if Poverty enters, she drops a
courtesy, and is called 'genteel,' you cry, 'Hold, produce your passport;
where are your credentials, references?' I have none. I have slipped
out of the world I once moved in. I can no more appeal to those I knew
in it than if I had transmigrated from one of yon stars, and said, 'See
there what I was once!' Oh, but you do not think she looks ill!--do you?
do you? Wretch that I am! And I thought to save her!"