fiction that they were all idle beggars together.

The sister became a dancer. There was a ruined uncle in the family
group--ruined by his brother, the Father of the Marshalsea, and
knowing no more how than his ruiner did, but accepting the fact as
an inevitable certainty--on whom her protection devolved.
Naturally a retired and simple man, he had shown no particular
sense of being ruined at the time when that calamity fell upon him,
further than that he left off washing himself when the shock was
announced, and never took to that luxury any more. He had been a
very indifferent musical amateur in his better days; and when he
fell with his brother, resorted for support to playing a clarionet
as dirty as himself in a small Theatre Orchestra. It was the
theatre in which his niece became a dancer; he had been a fixture
there a long time when she took her poor station in it; and he
accepted the task of serving as her escort and guardian, just as he
would have accepted an illness, a legacy, a feast, starvation--
anything but soap.

To enable this girl to earn her few weekly shillings, it was
necessary for the Child of the Marshalsea to go through an
elaborate form with the Father.

'Fanny is not going to live with us just now, father. She will be
here a good deal in the day, but she is going to live outside with
uncle.'

'You surprise me. Why?'

'I think uncle wants a companion, father. He should be attended