The young men were friends immediately, and at once deep in college-talk. And Pen, who had been acting rather the fine gentleman on a previous day, when he pretended to Lowton that he could not drink port wine at dinner, seeing Warrington take his share with a great deal of gusto, did not scruple about helping himself any more, rather to the disappointment of honest Lowton. When the dinner was over, Warrington asked Arthur where he was going.
"I thought of going home to dress, and hear Grisi in Norma," Pen said.
"Are you going to meet any body there?" he asked.
Pen said, "No—only to hear the music, of which he was very fond."
"You had much better come home and smoke a pipe with me," said Warrington—"a very short one. Come, I live close by in Lamb Court, and we'll talk over Boniface and old times."
They went away; Lowton sighed after them. He knew that Warrington was a baronet's son, and he looked up with simple reverence to all the aristocracy. Pen and Warrington became sworn friends from that night. Warrington's cheerfulness and jovial temper, his good sense, his rough welcome, and his never-failing pipe of tobacco, charmed Pen, who found it more pleasant to dive into shilling taverns with him, than to dine in solitary state among the silent and polite frequenters of the Polyanthus.
Ere long Pen gave up the lodgings in St. James's, to which he had migrated on quitting his hotel, and found it was much more economical to take up his abode with Warrington in Lamb Court, and furnish and occupy his friend's vacant room there. For it must be said of Pen, that no man was more easily led than he to do a thing, when it was a novelty, or when he had a mind to it. And Pidgeon, the youth, and Flanagan, the laundress, divided their allegiance now between Warrington and Pen.