Free New Grub Street by George Gissing Page A

with me, darling, a little longer.'
    He knelt by her, and looked up into her face.
    'Say only one or two kind words—like you used to!'
    She passed her hand lightly over his hair, and murmured
something with a faint smile.
    Then Reardon took his hat and stick and descended the eight
flights of stone steps, and walked in the darkness round the outer
circle of Regent's Park, racking his fagged brain in a hopeless
search for characters, situations, motives.

CHAPTER V. THE WAY HITHER
    Even in mid-rapture of his marriage month he had foreseen this
possibility; but fate had hitherto rescued him in sudden ways when
he was on the brink of self-abandonment, and it was hard to imagine
that this culmination of triumphant joy could be a preface to base
miseries.
    He was the son of a man who had followed many different
pursuits, and in none had done much more than earn a livelihood. At
the age of forty—when Edwin, his only child, was ten years old—Mr
Reardon established himself in the town of Hereford as a
photographer, and there he abode until his death, nine years after,
occasionally risking some speculation not inconsistent with the
photographic business, but always with the result of losing the
little capital he ventured. Mrs Reardon died when Edwin had reached
his fifteenth year. In breeding and education she was superior to
her husband, to whom, moreover, she had brought something between
four and five hundred pounds; her temper was passionate in both
senses of the word, and the marriage could hardly be called a happy
one, though it was never disturbed by serious discord. The
photographer was a man of whims and idealisms; his wife had a
strong vein of worldly ambition. They made few friends, and it was
Mrs Reardon's frequently expressed desire to go and live in London,
where fortune, she thought, might be kinder to them. Reardon had
all but made up his mind to try this venture when he suddenly
became a widower; after that he never summoned energy to embark on
new enterprises.
    The boy was educated at an excellent local school; at eighteen
he had a far better acquaintance with the ancient classics than
most lads who have been expressly prepared for a university, and,
thanks to an anglicised Swiss who acted as an assistant in Mr
Reardon's business, he not only read French, but could talk it with
a certain haphazard fluency. These attainments, however, were not
of much practical use; the best that could be done for Edwin was to
place him in the office of an estate agent. His health was
indifferent, and it seemed likely that open-air exercise, of which
he would have a good deal under the particular circumstances of the
case, might counteract the effects of study too closely
pursued.
    At his father's death he came into possession (practically it
was put at his disposal at once, though he was little more than
nineteen) of about two hundred pounds—a life-insurance for five
hundred had been sacrificed to exigencies not very long before. He
had no difficulty in deciding how to use this money. His mother's
desire to live in London had in him the force of an inherited
motive; as soon as possible he released himself from his
uncongenial occupations, converted into money all the possessions
of which he had not immediate need, and betook himself to the
metropolis.
    To become a literary man, of course.
    His capital lasted him nearly four years, for, notwithstanding
his age, he lived with painful economy. The strangest life, of
almost absolute loneliness. From a certain point of Tottenham Court
Road there is visible a certain garret window in a certain street
which runs parallel with that thoroughfare; for the greater part of
these four years the garret in question was Reardon's home. He paid
only three-and-sixpence a week for the privilege of living there;
his food cost him about a shilling a day; on clothing and other
unavoidable expenses he laid out some five pounds yearly. Then he
bought books—volumes which cost anything between