The Project Gutenberg EBook of In the Year of Jubilee, by George Gissing

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Title: In the Year of Jubilee

Author: George Gissing

Release Date: August, 2003 [Etext #4307]
Posting Date: January 6, 2010
Last Updated: May 23, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE YEAR OF JUBILEE ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo and Janet Blenkinship

IN THE YEAR OF JUBILEE

By George Gissing

Part I: Miss. Lord

CHAPTER 1

At eight o'clock on Sunday morning, Arthur Peachey unlocked his front
door, and quietly went forth. He had not ventured to ask that early
breakfast should be prepared for him. Enough that he was leaving
home for a summer holiday--the first he had allowed himself since his
marriage three years ago.

It was a house in De Crespigny Park; unattached, double-fronted, with
half-sunk basement, and a flight of steps to the stucco pillars at
the entrance. De Crespigny Park, a thoroughfare connecting Grove
Lane, Camberwell, with Denmark Hill, presents a double row of similar
dwellings; its clean breadth, with foliage of trees and shrubs in front
gardens, makes it pleasant to the eye that finds pleasure in suburban
London. In point of respectability, it has claims only to be appreciated
by the ambitious middle-class of Camberwell. Each house seems to remind
its neighbour, with all the complacence expressible in buff brick, that
in this locality lodgings are _not_ to let.

For an hour after Peachey's departure, the silence of the house was
unbroken. Then a bedroom door opened, and a lady in a morning gown of
the fashionable heliotrope came downstairs. She had acute features;
eyes which seemed to indicate the concentration of her thoughts upon a
difficult problem, and cheeks of singular bloom. Her name was Beatrice
French; her years numbered six and twenty.

She entered the dining-room and drew up the blind. Though the furniture
was less than a year old, and by no means of the cheapest description,
slovenly housekeeping had dulled the brightness of every surface. On
a chair lay a broken toy, one of those elaborate and costly playthings
which serve no purpose but to stunt