There have been many whose earnestness has vanished with the presence of those whose influence awoke it.
Letty's better self seemed to have remained behind with Mary; and not even if he had been as good as she thought him, could Tom himself have made up to her for the loss of such a friend.
But Letty had not found marriage at all the grand thing she had expected.

With the faithfulness of a woman, however, she attributed her disappointment to something inherent in marriage, nowise affecting the man whom marriage had made her husband.
That he might be near the center to which what little work he did gravitated, Tom had taken a lodging in a noisy street, as unlike all that Letty had been accustomed to as anything London, except in its viler parts, could afford.

Never a green thing was to be looked upon in any direction.

Not a sweet sound was to be heard.
The sun, at this time of the year, was seldom to be seen in London anywhere; and in Lydgate Street, even when there was no fog, it was but askance, and for a brief portion of the day, that he shone upon that side where stood their dusty windows.

And then the noise!--a ceaseless torrent of sounds, of stony sounds, of iron sounds, of grinding sounds, of clashing sounds, of yells and cries--of all deafening and unpoetic discords! Letty had not much poetry in her, and needed what could be had from the outside so much the more.