Taking the Leap to London — Villette

On the first of March Lucy sees the dome of St Paul's through fog and tells herself she did well to come. The grey-haired waiter, twenty years in the inn, remembers her uncles Charles and Wilmot and thereafter treats her as someone with a footing. She walks out alone, buys a book at Jones's in Paternoster Row that she can ill afford, climbs the dome, and loses herself in the Strand and Cornhill, loving the city because it is earning its living. At two she dines, sleeps on three chairs, and wakes sure that if she died away from England nobody would weep. She forms a project.

That evening she learns a ship sails for Boue-Marine and takes her berth at once, overpaying the waiter. The coachman abandons her among watermen. When one lays hands on her she steps into a boat and is rowed past The Ocean, The Phoenix, The Consort, and The Dolphin to The Vivid. The waterman draws off until she pays six shillings. The steward says she has been cheated. She says she knew it. Below, the stewardess is barely civil and talks all night of a sister's imprudent match and of the profit she expects from the Watsons.

By sunrise the Watsons come aboard in velvet and flowers, a beautiful young bride gay beside a husband like an oil-barrel. She offers Lucy a camp-stool. Lucy declines. A girl in a print dress arrives with her father, who curls his lip at Lucy's mourning, kisses his daughter, and goes ashore. Once the packet sails, that girl, Ginevra Fanshawe, seventeen and already blasée, attaches herself. She is bound for a horrid school in Villette, cannot translate a page of easy German, and is not sure whether she is Protestant or Catholic. Her uncle de Bassompierre pays the bills. Her sister Augusta has married rich Mr. Davies, still the colour of a guinea after yellow fever. Lucy says she is as poor as Job and must earn a living where she can find it. Ginevra goes below to be sick and to order the stewardess about.

Lucy stays on deck in a happiness that does not match the hazard, dreams a golden coast, and then cancels it: day-dreams are delusions of the demon. Sick at last, she tells Ginevra, peevish in the next berth, to hold her tongue, and the rebuke does the girl good. Near midnight the Vivid is in port. Friends carry off the Watsons and Miss Fanshawe. At the inn Lucy's English coins are refused. A waiter changes a sovereign. She shuts herself, still sea-sick, into a very small room, with destitution nearer than it was in London.