‘No. I should not like it for you. I don’t want you to get the habit of roaming about London. It is not good either for soul or body. A lodging near the office is best.’ ‘You surely don’t mean to shut me up in the evenings,’ said the boy. ‘You don’t mean me to stay indoors all the night?’ ‘It would be much better for you if you did--for yourself. You could find plenty to occupy you. You might carry on your studies, or, if you wanted amusement, you might read. Twenty years hence you will be pleased to think that was how you spent your nights.’ ‘I can see no reason,’ he said, ‘why I could not do all that, and yet live where I am.’ ‘That is because you love the streets,’ said his mother. ‘I know: oh, I did not require that you should tell me. You like the movement and the noise and the amusement.’ ‘It is quite true,’ said John, ‘and is there any harm?’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘did not I tell you, Susie--he is his father’s son.’ CHAPTER VII. A MAN GROWN. After this there ensues a gap in John’s life:--no real gap, indeed, but a steady, quiet continuance of work and training of which the record might be interesting enough to those who are pursuing the same path, but not perhaps to anyone else. He was transferred to lodgings nearer his work, almost without any will of his own, his mother acting for him with a steady authority against which he chafed, but which it was impossible to resist. The lodgings might have been the same as those from which he was transferred, a little parlour, a little bed-room, a red and blue cover on the table, a horse-hair sofa, the same features were in both. And here John settled down. He knew nobody to lead him into the ordinary haunts of young men in London; and perhaps the fixed prepossession against him that he was sure to like what was wrong, had as strong an influence as the fixed certainty that nothing but right and honest things could come from him, which does so much for some favourites of nature. Human nature is very contradictory, and no two specimens can be guided in the same way. His mother’s stern observation of every possible indication of weakness, and Susie’s wistful watch, enlisted perhaps the evil as well as the good of John’s nature in the cause of virtue. His temper, and that perversity which is more or less in every natural character, rose in arms against the imputation that was upon him. He said to himself that, whatever happened, their prognostics should not be permitted to be right: and thus aided, so to speak, by his demons as well as by his angels, with his head held high against all the solicitations of the lower nature which would have proved that injurious foregone conclusion to be a just one, he made his way through the loneliness of those early years--going back evening after evening to spend the dull hours in his little sitting-room, with a determination which virtue alone might not have been equal to, without the aid of