me for a comfortable pensioner.'

'Or is it not, that you have been living the gentleman out there, with
just a holiday title to it?'

Gower was hit by his father's thrust. 'I shall feel myself a pieman's
chuckpenny as long as I'm unproductive, now I 've come back and have to
own to a home,' he said.

Tea brought in by Mrs. Mary Jones rather brightened him until he
considered that the enlivenment was due to a purchase by money,
of which he was incapable, and he rejected it, like an honourable man.
Simultaneously, the state of depression threw critic shades on a prized
sentence or two among his recent confections. It was rejected for the
best of reasons and the most discomforting: because it racked our
English; signifying, that he had not yet learnt the right use of his
weapons.

He was in this wrestle, under a placid demeanour, for several days,
hearing the shouts of Whitechapel Kit's victory, and hearing of Sarah
Winch's anxiety on account of her sister Madge; unaffected by sounds of
joy or grief, in his effort to produce a supple English, with Baden's
Madonna for sole illumination of his darkness. To her, to the
illimitable gold-mist of perspective and the innumerable images the
thought of her painted for him, he owed the lift which withdrew him from
contemplation of himself in a very disturbing stagnant pool of the
wastes; wherein often will strenuous youth, grown faint, behold a face
beneath a scroll inscribed Impostor. All whose aim was high have spied
into that pool, and have seen the face. His glorious lady would not let
it haunt him.