n the meantime, unpleasant remarks, disguise them as some well-meaning
people might, were floating around them every day. The undoubted
truth, that they were the children of a dreamer who let slip away every
farthing of his money and ran into debt with his neighbours--that the
daughter had been brought up to no profession--that the son who had, had
made no progress in it, and might come to the dogs--could not from the
nature of things be wrapped up in silence in order that it might not
hurt their feelings; and as a matter of fact, it greeted their ears in
some form or other wherever they went. Their few acquaintances passed
them hurriedly. Ancient pot-wallopers, and thriving shopkeepers, in
their intervals of leisure, stood at their shop-doors--their toes
hanging over the edge of the step, and their obese waists hanging over
their toes--and in discourses with friends on the pavement, formulated
the course of the improvident, and reduced the children's prospects to a
shadow-like attenuation. The sons of these men (who wore breastpins of
a sarcastic kind, and smoked humorous pipes) stared at Cytherea with a
stare unmitigated by any of the respect that had formerly softened it.

Now it is a noticeable fact that we do not much mind what men think of
us, or what humiliating secret they discover of our means, parentage, or
object, provided that each thinks and acts thereupon in isolation. It is
the exchange of ideas about us that we dread most; and the possession
by a hundred acquaintances, severally insulated, of the knowledge of our
skeleton-closet's whereabouts, is not so distressing to the nerves as a
chat over it by a party of half-a-dozen--exclusive depositaries though
these may be.

Perhaps, though Hocbridge watched and whispered, its animus would have
been little more than a trifle to persons in thriving circumstances. But
unfortunately, poverty, whilst it is new, and before the skin has
had time to thicken, makes people susceptible inversely to their
opportunities for shielding themselves. In Owen was found, in place of
his father's impressibility, a larger share of his father's pride, and a
squareness of idea which, if coupled with a little more blindness, would
have amounted to positive prejudice. To him humanity, so far as he had
thought of it at all, was rather divided into distinct classes than
blended from extreme to extreme. Hence by a sequence of ideas which
might be traced if it were worth while, he either d