from what Ernest has
told me, and partly from his school bills which I remember Theobald shewed me
with much complaining. There was an institution at Roughborough called the
monthly merit money; the maximum sum which a boy of Ernest's age could get was
four shillings and sixpence; several boys got four shillings and few less than
sixpence, but Ernest never got more than half a crown and seldom more than
eighteen pence; his average would, I should think be about one and nine pence,
which was just too much for him to rank among the downright bad boys, but too
little to put him among the good ones.
 

                                   Volume II

                                     Part I

                                   Chapter 32

I must return to Miss Alethæa Pontifex, of whom I have said perhaps too little
hitherto, considering how great her influence upon my hero's destiny proved to
be.
    On the death of her father, which happened when she was about thirty-two
years old, she parted company with her sisters between whom and herself there
had been little sympathy, and came up to London. She was determined, so she
said, to make the rest of her life as happy as she could, and she had clearer
ideas about the best way of setting to work to do this than women, or indeed
men, generally have.
    Her fortune consisted, as I have said, of £5000 which had come to her by her
mother's marriage settlements, and £15,000 left her by her father, over both
which sums she had now absolute control. These brought her in about £900 a year,
and the money being invested in none but the soundest securities she had no
anxiety about her income. She meant to be rich, so she formed a scheme of
expenditure which involved an annual outlay of about £500, and determinted to
put the rest by. »If I do this,« she said laughingly, »I shall probably just
succeed in living comfortably within my income.« In accordance with this scheme
she took unfurnished apartments in a house in Gower Street of which the lower
floors were let out as offices. John Pontifex tried to get her to take a house
to herself, but Alethæa told him to mind his own business so plainly that he had
to beat a retreat. She had never liked him, and from that time dropped him
almost entirely.
    Without going much into society she yet became acquainted with most of the
men and women who had attained a position in the literary, artistic and
scientific worlds, and it was singular how highly her opinion was valued in
spite of her never having attempted in any way to distinguish