pleased good Mrs. Purp so much. She felt that it added glamour to
her house to have him do so, and always called her husband, a
frightened silent creature with no collar and a humble air, up
from the basement to admire. Mr. Purp's time, Gissing suspected,
was irretrievably wasted--a good deal of it, to judge by his
dusty appearance, in rolling around in ashcans or in the company
of the neighbourhood bootlegger; but then, he reflected, in a
charitable seizure, you must not judge other people's
time-spendings by a calculus of your own.

Perhaps he himself was growing a little miserly in this matter.
Indulging in the rare, the sovereign luxury of thinking, he had
suddenly become aware of time's precious fluency, and wondered
why everyone else didn't think about it as passionately as he
did. In the privacy of his room, weary after the day afoot, he
took off his cutaway coat and trousers and enjoyed his old habit
of stretching out on the floor for a good rest. There he would
lie, not asleep, but in a bliss of passive meditation. He even
grudged Mrs. Purp the little chats she loved--she made a point of
coming up with clean towels when she knew he was in his room,
because she cherished hearing him talk. When he heard her knock,
he had to scramble hastily to his feet, get on his clothes, and
pretend he had been sitting calmly in the rocking chair. It would
never do to let her find him sprawled on the floor. She had an
almost painful respect for him. Once, when prospective lodgers
were bargaining for rooms, and he happened to be wearing his
Beagle and Company attire, she had asked him to do her the favour
of walking down the stairs, so that the visitors might be
impressed by the gentility of the establishment.