d have been
delighted to take you for only twenty-five shillings a week for the sake
of the family if you had not been a smoker. She told me to ask you if you
had ever seen a horse or a dog smoking tobacco. They are such nice,
comfortable people, and the children would have been company for you.
Johnnie, who used to be such a dear little fellow, has just gone into an
office in the City, and seems to have excellent prospects. How I wish, my
dear Lucian, that you could do something in the same way. Don't forget
Mr. Jones's in Water Street, and you might mention your name to him."

Lucian never troubled Mr. Jones; but these letters of his cousin's always
refreshed him by the force of contrast. He tried to imagine himself a
part of the Dolly family, going dutifully every morning to the City on
the bus, and returning in the evening for high tea. He could conceive the
fine odor of hot roast beef hanging about the decorous house on Sunday
afternoons, papa asleep in the dining-room, mamma lying down, and the
children quite good and happy with their "Sundays books." In the evening,
after supper, one read the _Quiver_ till bedtime. Such pictures as these
were to Lucian a comfort and a help, a remedy against despair. Often when
he felt overwhelmed by the difficulty of the work he had undertaken, he
thought of the alternative career, and was strengthened.

He returned again and again to that desire of a prose which should sound
faintly, not so much with an audible music, but with the memory and echo
of it. In the night, when the last tram had gone jangling by, and he had
looked out and seen the street all wrapped about in heavy folds of the
mist, he conducted some of his most delicate experiments. In that white
and solitary midnight of the suburban street he experienced the curious
sense of being on a tower, remote and apart and high above all the
troubles of the earth. The gas lamp, which was nearly opposite, shone in
a pale halo of light, and the houses themselves were merely indistinct
marks and shadows amidst that palpable whiteness, shutting out the world
and its noises. The knowledge of the swarming life that was so still,
though it surrounded him, made the silence seem deeper than that of the
mountains before the dawn; it was as if he alone stirred and looked out
amidst a host sleeping at his feet. The fog came in by the open window in
freezing puffs, and as Lucian watched he noticed that it shook and
wavered like the sea, t