hand over his eyes.

"I'm ready, Mary, my dear; I'm ready! It's no good saying anything to
girls like these. Good-bye, Lyddy; good-bye, Thyrza. May you have a
happy Christmas, children! This isn't the first as you've made a happy
one for me."'--(p. 117.)

The anonymously published _Demos_ (1886) can hardly be described as a
typical product of George Gissing's mind and art. In it he subdued himself
rather to the level of such popular producers as Besant and Rice, and went
out of his way to procure melodramatic suspense, an ingredient far from
congenial to his normal artistic temper. But the end justified the means.
The novel found favour in the eyes of the author of _The Lost Sir
Massingberd_, and Gissing for the first time in his life found himself the
possessor of a full purse, with fifty 'jingling, tingling, golden, minted
quid' in it. Its possession brought with it the realisation of a paramount
desire, the desire for Greece and Italy which had become for him, as it had
once been with Goethe, a scarce endurable suffering. The sickness of
longing had wellnigh given way to despair, when 'there came into my hands a
sum of money (such a poor little sum) for a book I had written. It was
early autumn. I chanced to hear some one speak of Naples--and only death
would have held me back.'[10]

[Footnote 10: See _Emancipated_, chaps. iv.-xii.; _New Grub Street_, chap,
xxvii.; _Ryecroft_, Autumn xix.; the short, not superior, novel called
_Sleeping Fires_, 1895, chap. i. 'An encounter on the Kerameikos'; _The
Albany_, Christmas 1904, p. 27; and _Monthly Review_, vol. xvi. 'He went
straight by sea to the land of his dreams--Italy. It was still happily
before the enterprise of touring agencies had fobbed the idea of Italian
travel of its last vestiges of magic. He spent as much time as he could