"Are _all_ women unscrupulous when they fight for their children?
They cannot all be certain, as I am, that their children were born for greatness: and yet, I wonder sometimes--" She wound up with a smile which held something of a playful irony, but more of sadness.
"Jacky could not come with you ?" "No, and he writes bitterly about it.

He is tied to Oxford--by lack of pence, again." By this time Charles had slipped on his jacket, and the pair stepped out into the streets and set their faces eastward.

Mrs.Wesley was cockney-bred and delighted in the stir and rush of life.

She, the mother of many children, kept a well-poised figure and walked with the elastic step of a maid; and as she went she chatted, asking a score of shrewd questions about Westminster--the masters, the food, the old dormitory in which Charles slept, the new one then rising to replace it; breaking off to recognise some famous building, or to pause and gaze after a company of his Majesty's guards.

Her own masterful carriage and unembarrassed mode of speech--"as if all London belonged to her," Charles afterwards described it--drew the stares of the passers-by; stares which she misinterpreted, for in the gut of the Strand, a few paces beyond Somerset House, she suddenly twirled the lad about and "Bless us, child, your eye's enough to frighten the town! 'Tis to be hoped brother Sam has not turned Quaker in India; or that Sally the cook-maid has a beefsteak handy." Mr.Matthew Wesley, apothecary and by courtesy "surgeon," to whose house in Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, they presently swerved aside, had not returned from his morning's round of visits.