seum and the commencement of the symposium. To be alone with their thoughts is to some men a perennial source of happiness. To Dicky it was exactly the reverse. For solitude led him to look back at the past or forward to the future. Neither of these prospects afforded him the slightest pleasure.

VOL II.

14

CHAPTER IX.

HEN Dr. Chacomb left Marion, she remembered the promise made to her pensioner, and hurried away from the Park. If you have a constant drag and drain upon your resources, you come, after a time, to regard it as a necessary evil, like a humpback or a stiff leg, and cease to think of it in the light in which it first presented itself, of an intolerable nuisance. Provided Mrs. Spenser confined her applications for help to herself, Marion hardly minded. It was but so much a week added to the burden she had to bear. The chief thing she feared. was that some time or other this excitable lady would break her promise, and invade their lodgings, where Adie might see her.

Mrs. Spenser, desperately poor, as has been

shown, lived in about the most ignoble neighbourhood in all London, always excepting certain portions of Pentonville. It was in Suncourt, St. Giles's, a place where every room held a family, and many rooms held more than one family each. She lived there with her son, called, by reason of a St. Vitus's dance which possessed the boy, and impelled him to kick out at odd times, to the discomfiture and indignation of passers-by, Rickety Jem. She had one room for herself and her son, and they slept in opposite corners. Try, if you can, to realize the degradation of a woman who had indeed once been a lady, when she had one room for herself and her boy of fourteen. The infamies and miseries of poverty can all be summed up in this. Nothing-not even insufficiency of food, insufficiency of clothes, or abject dependence-is so great an evil as the enforced huddling together in one room of a whole family. It is too horrible to tell of, too horrible to think of.

Yet the people in Sun-court were not exceptionally vicious or wicked. There are courts -one I know of, only a few yards north of

Mecklenburgh-square—where a decently dressed man who ventured to pass through in the daytime would be infallibly set upon and robbed, and where if a policeman dares to show his burly form he is saluted with flower-pots rained upon him from the windows, with other casual manifestations of an unpopularity that belongs to a class rather than to an individual. In Sun-court anybody might pass through at any hour with impunity. The policeman was looked on as not a friend exactly, but as a necessary evil. The inhabitants were harmless, except in one particular, that they were poor. When people are poor, however, they are dangerous. It is a fact well known to modern legislators, just as it was known to Julius Cæsar, that a well-fed man is contented with the order of things. That is why, if a member of Parliament shows signs of making himself disagreeable, he is presented with something good in the shape of a commissionership.

Mrs. Spenser lived partly on what she could extract from Marion, and partly on what she earned as a maker of cardboard boxes. Her son contributed his share by selling the Echo,

cigar-lights, and such penny papers as he could beg from gentlemen at the Metropolitan railway stations. It was a miserable and precarious livelihood. She was a miserable and a discontented woman. She held herself aloof from her

neighbours, on the plea that she was a lady. She tried, but ineffectually, to keep the boy separated from the other boys in the street, on the ground that his father was a gentleman. The people in the court called her Lady Spenser-a title which she accepted with a kind of gratitude.

How long does it take to reduce a lady to the lowest dregs? how long a gentleman to the level of the habitual criminal? It is a question one hardly dares to ask. We may pass from one stratum of life to another with greater ease than we like to think of. The descent of Avernus is steeper than we imagine. The difference between those who wear respectable clothes and those who do not is less than we are pleased to think. Thousands have found it easy to step across the gulf, and once across, all must perforce stay there. For the heaven of respectability is like Abraham's bosom, as