A Proposal to Share Lodgings
The narrator proposes that the woman lodge in the same room as him to save money, and assures her he will undertake to cure her while she shares all the conveniences he can afford. She accepts with unfeigned gratitude, and becomes both an agreeable companion who eases his low spirits and a careful, faithful, affectionate nurse.
The Tale of Her Undoing
When the narrator expresses surprise that a woman with her beauty, good sense, and education could be reduced to such an infamous, miserable way of life, she sighs that these very advantages were the cause of her undoing, and begins to comply with his request to share the particulars of her story.
第二十一章
Having helped his fellow countryman Captain Gawky during a street altercation with watchmen, the narrator finds himself accused by his master of stealing medicines. Although he had rescued Gawky from custody and suffered an injured eye in the process, the captain does not reciprocate the kindness but instead, along with his new wife (the apothecary’s daughter whom Gawky has wed), engineers a scheme to plant stolen goods in the narrator’s chest. When the medicines are discovered in his room, the narrator is dismissed despite his protestations of innocence, and his reputation is ruined beyond repair as his friends, including the schoolmaster, refuse to believe him. Reduced to poverty and isolation, he takes a garret room near St. Giles’s, where he fortuitously discovers the very lady he once courted lying near death in an adjacent chamber, having been fleeced by a quack doctor and left penniless. Moved by compassion, the narrator tends to her, forgives her past machinations against him, and offers to share his lodgings and cure her, an arrangement she accepts with gratitude.
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