The String of Pearls (1850), p. 243

most truly hazardous course of proceeding; but then it is a fault of the young to
mistake daring for ability, and to fancy that that course of proceeding which
involves the most personal risk is necessarily the most likely to be successful.
Colonel Jeffery was, of all Johanna Oakley's advisers, the one who was most likely to advise her well, but unfortunately he had told her that he loved her, and
from that time, with an instinctive delicacy of feeling which no one could have to greater perfection than Johanna, she had shunned him. And yet the reader,
who knows the colonel well, knows that, quite irrespective of the attachment that
had sprung up in his bosom for the beautiful and heart-stricken girl, he would
have played the part of a sincere friend to her and stood manfully between her
and all danger. But it was not to be. From the moment that he had breathed
to her the secret of his attachment, a barrier was, in her imagination, raised between them. Her father evidently was not one who could or who would
advise anything at all energetic; and as for Big Ben, the conversation she had
had with him upon the subject had quite been sufficient to convince her that to
take him out of the ordinary routine of his thoughts and habits was
thoroughly to bewilder him, and that he was as little calculated to plot and to
plan in any emergency as a child. She would indeed have trembled at the result of the confidential communication to Big Ben, if she had been aware of the
frightfully imprudent manner in which he had thrown himself into communication and collision with Todd, the consequences of which glaring act of indiscretion he was only saved from by Sir Richard Blunt entering the shop, and remaining there until he (Ben) was shaved. Under all these circumstances,
then, Johanna found herself thrown back upon her old friend Arabella Wilmot.
Now, Arabella was the worst adviser of all, for the romantic notions she had
received from her novel reading, imparted so strong a tone to her character,
that she might be said in imagination to live in a world of the mind. It was,
as the reader will recollect, to Arabella Wilmot that Johanna owed the idea of
going to Todd in boy's apparel---a measure fraught with frightful danger, and yet, to the fancy of the young girl, fascinating upon that very account, because it had the appearance as though she were doing something really serious for Mark Ingestre. To Arabella, then, Johanna went, after Ben had left her, and finding her young friend within, she told her all that had occurred since they last met.
"What shall I do?" she said. "I tell my tale of woe, and people look kind
upon me, but no one helps me."
"Oh, Johanna, can you say that of me?"
"No, no. Not of you, Arabella, for you see I have come to you again; but
of all others, I can and may say it."
"Comfort yourself, my dear Johanna. Comfort yourself, my dear friend.
Come, now---you will make me weep too, if I see those tears."
"What shall I do?---what shall I do ?"
"There, now, I am putting on my things; and as you are dressed, we will
go out for a walk, and as we go along we can talk of the affair, and you
will find your spirits improve by exercise. Come, my dear Johanna. Don't
you give way so."
"I cannot help it. Let us go."
"We will walk round St. Paul's Churchyard."
"No---no. To Fleet Street---to Fleet Street!"
"Why would you wish to add to your sorrows, by again looking upon that
shop?"
"I do not know, I cannot tell you; but a horrible species of fascination draws me there, and if I come from home, I seem as though I were drawn from all other places towards that one by an irresistible attraction. It seems as though the blood of Mark Ingestrie called aloud to me to revenge his murder, by bringing the perpetrators of it to justice. Oh, my friend&---my Arabella, I think I shall go mad."
Johanna sunk upon her knees by a chair, and hid her fair face in her hands,