representatives of two pecuniary extremes in society, looked for what
recreations they wanted with their own eyes, pursued those recreations
within their own limits, and enjoyed themselves unreservedly in
consequence. Not so with the moderate incomes: they, in their social
moments, shrank absurdly far from the poor people's porter and shrimps;
crawled contemptibly near to the rich people's rare wines and luxurious
dishes; exposed their poverty in imitation by chemical champagne from
second-rate wine merchants, by flabby salads and fetid oyster-patties
from second-rate pastry-cooks; were, in no one of their festive
arrangements, true to their incomes, to their order, or to themselves;
and, in very truth, for all these reasons and many more, got no real
enjoyment out of their lives, from one year's end to another.

On the outskirts of that part of the new suburb appropriated to these
unhappy middle classes with moderate incomes, there lived a gentleman
(by name Mr. Valentine Blyth) whose life offered as strong a practical
contradiction as it is possible to imagine to the lives of his
neighbors.

He was by profession an artist--an artist in spite of circumstances.
Neither his father, nor his mother, nor any relation of theirs, on
either side, had ever practiced the Art of Painting, or had ever
derived any special pleasure from the contemplation of pictures. They
were all respectable commercial people of the steady fund-holding old
school, who lived exclusively within their own circle; and had never so
much as spoken to a live artist or author in the whole course of their
lives. The City-world in which Valentine's boyhood was passed, was as
destitute of art influences of any kind as if it had been situated on
the coast of Greenland; and yet, to the astonishment of everybody, he
was always drawing and painting, in his own rude way, at every leisure