drudges are at work, no one will take him for a drudge. I will confess
it gave me pleasure to note this change of estimate. I seemed to taste
the first privilege of a freeman, when a pursy bookseller took from a
glass case certain expensive books on Art, and drew my attention, with
subtle deference to my judgment, to the merits of the pictures they
contained. I may as well confess at once, that so intoxicated was I
with the new respect that greeted me, that I even bought one of these
volumes, which I did not need, and certainly could not afford. It was
a weakness and a folly, no doubt; but how could I tell my obsequious
friend that I paid my guinea not for anything he sold me, but as a sort
of first footing on my entrance to the realm of freedom? I might have
spent it much worse, for I bought my self-respect with it.

The sight of my doorstep brought me to my bearings, for a man's own
doorstep is a rare corrective of disordered fancies. The fact I had to
communicate was briefly this; That I had lost 250 pounds per annum,
against which I had 50 pounds to show by way of compensation. Women, I
have long noticed--or women of the best kind, I ought to add--have much
more genius in finance than men. They have a much keener sense of the
use of money; an excellent thing in women when it does not deteriorate
into cheese-paring and sordid parsimony. They, being primitive and
unsophisticated creatures, are unacquainted with the lax morals of the
cheque-book; a pound is just twenty shillings to them, and each
shilling is an entity, and each is spent with an indomitable aim to get
the most out of it. How would my wife regard the definite
disappearance of five thousand shillings? Not with levity, I knew; and
I thought it best to say nothing of that guinea volume on the _Tombs of
the Etruscans_. The _Tombs of the Etruscans_ would have meant to her
three pairs of boots; and I wished that I might conceal it in mine. A
wise bishop once argued that marriage was ordained not for man's