“Very well? By Gad, sir, she’s the finest lady I ever met in my life,” bounced out the Major. “I say at once, let us go and ask her if this woman ought to be visited or not—I will be content with her verdict.” Now this odious, artful rogue of a Major was thinking in his own mind that he was sure of his case. Emmy, he remembered, was at one time cruelly and deservedly jealous of Rebecca, never mentioned her name but with a shrinking and terror—a jealous woman never forgives, thought Dobbin: and so the pair went across the street to Mrs. George’s house, where she was contentedly warbling at a music lesson with Madame Strumpff.

When that lady took her leave, Jos opened the business with his usual pomp of words. “Amelia, my dear,” said he, “I have just had the most extraordinary—yes— God bless my soul! the most extraordinary adventure— an old friend—yes, a most interesting old friend of yours, and I may say in old times, has just arrived here, and I should like you to see her.”

“Her!” said Amelia, “who is it? Major Dobbin, if you please not to break my scissors.” The Major was twirling them round by the little chain from which they sometimes hung to their lady’s waist, and was thereby endangering his own eye. It is a woman whom I dislike very much,” said the Major, doggedly, “and whom you have no cause to love.”

“It is Rebecca, I’m sure it is Rebecca,” Amelia said, blushing and being very much agitated.

“You are right; you always are,” Dobbin answered. Brussels, Waterloo, old, old times, griefs, pangs, remembrances, rushed back into Amelia’s gentle heart and caused a cruel agitation there.

“Don’t let me see her,” Emmy continued. “I couldn’t see her.”

“I told you so,” Dobbin said to Jos.

“She is very unhappy, and—and that sort of thing,” Jos urged. “She is very poor and unprotected, and has been ill—exceedingly ill—and that scoundrel of a husband has deserted her.”

“Ah!” said Amelia

“She hasn’t a friend in the world,” Jos went on, not undexterously, “and she said she thought she might trust in you. She’s so miserable, Emmy. She has been almost mad with grief. Her story quite affected me—’pon my word and honour, it did—never was such a cruel persecution borne so angelically, I may say. Her family has been most cruel to her.”

“Poor creature!” Amelia said.

“And if she can get no friend, she says she thinks she’ll die,” Jos proceeded in a low tremulous voice. “God bless my soul! do you know that she tried to kill herself? She carries laudanum with her—I saw the bottle in her room —such a miserable little room—at a third-rate house, the Elephant, up in the roof at the top of all. I went there.”

This did not seem to affect Emmy. She even smiled a little. Perhaps she figured Jos to herself panting up the stair.

“She’s beside herself with grief,” he resumed. “The agonies that woman has endured are quite frightful to hear of. She had a little boy, of the same age as Georgy.”

“Yes, yes, I think I remember,” Emmy remarked. “Well?”

“The most beautiful child ever seen,” Jos said, who was very fat, and easily moved, and had been touched by the story Becky told; “a perfect angel, who adored his mother. The ruffians tore him shrieking out of her arms, and have never allowed him to see her.”