large red Morocco case containing a bright gold chain, a yard and a
half long, with the most beautiful and curious cross to it that I
ever saw--the chain is as thick as my dead gold necklace, and you
may guess what sort of a thing it is when I tell you that I took it
to a jeweller here to have it weighed, and it weighed a pound all
but an ounce. The man said it never was made for less than fifty
guineas, but that he should think it had cost more."

Rosina, who has only £80 a year of her own, will not be outdone, and
cannot "resist ordering" Edward "a gold toilette, which he has long
wished for.... Round the rim of the basin and the handle of the ewer I
have ordered a wreath of _narcissus_ in dead gold, which, for Mr.
Pelham, you'll own, is not a bad idea."

It would be expected that all this crazy display would lead the young
couple rapidly and deeply into debt. That it did not do so is the most
curious phase of the story. Bulwer-Lytton immediately, and apparently
without the slightest difficulty, developed a literary industry the
sober record of which approaches the fabulous. Walter Scott alone may be
held to have equalled it. The giants of popular fiction did, indeed,
enjoy larger single successes than Bulwer-Lytton did, but none of them,
not Dickens himself, was so uniformly successful. Everything he wrote
sold as though it were bread displayed to a hungry crowd. Even his
poetry, so laboriously and lifelessly second-hand, always sold. He did
not know what failure was; he made money by _Devereux_; even _The New
Timon_ went into many editions. To earn what was required, however--and
in these early years he seems to have made £3000 his minimum of needful
return--to live in the insane style which his wife and he demanded, an
enormous nervous strain was required. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's temper had
always been warm and eager; it now grew irritable to the highest degree.