endure. The fruition of life to him was in the completing of
breeches, and its charm in a mutton-chop and a pipe of tobacco. He
had tried idleness, and was wise enough to know almost at the first
trial that idleness would not suit him. He had made one mistake in
life which was irreparable. He had migrated from Conduit Street to a
cold, comfortless box of a house at a place in which, in order that
his respectability might be maintained, he was not allowed to show
his face in a public-house. This was very bad, but he would not make
bad worse by giving up so much of Conduit Street as was still left to
him. He would stick to the shop. But what would he do with his money?
He had but one daughter. Thinking of this, day after day, month after
month, year after year, he came slowly to the conclusion that it was
his duty to make his daughter a lady. He must find some gentleman
who would marry her, and then would give that gentleman all his
money,--knowing as he did so that the gentleman would probably never
speak to him again. And to this conclusion he came with no bitterness
of feeling, with no sense of disappointment that to such an end must
come the exertions of his laborious and successful life. There was
nothing else for him to do. He could not be a gentleman himself. It
seemed to be no more within his reach than it is for the gentleman to
be an angel. He did not desire it. He would not have enjoyed it. He
had that sort of sense which makes a man know so thoroughly his own
limits that he has no regret at not passing them. But yet in his eyes
a gentleman was so grand a thing,--a being so infinitely superior to
himself,--that, loving his daughter above anything else, he did think
that he could die happy if he could see her married into a station
so exalted. There was a humility in this as regarded himself and an
affection for his child which were admirable.

The reader will think that he might at any rate have done better than
to pitch upon such a one as Ralph Newton; but then the reader hardly
knows Ralph Newton as yet, and cannot at all realise the difficulty
which poor Mr. Neefit experienced in coming across any gentleman
in such a fashion as to be able to commence his operations. It is
hardly open to a tradesman to ask a young man home to his house
when measuring him from the hip to the knee. Neefit had heard of
many cases in which gentlemen of money had married the daughters of
commercial men, and he knew that the thing