his four pounds thirteen and sixpence change.
Mr. Lucas Holderness, who had been eyeing the grocer's stock with a
curious intensity, immediately became animated and bought a tin of
salmon. He went out of the shop with the rest of the money in his
hand, for the pockets of his clothes were old and untrustworthy. At
the baker's he bought a new roll.
He bit a huge piece of the roll directly he was out of the shop, and
went on his way gnawing. It was so large a piece that his gnawing
mouth was contorted into the ugliest shapes. He swallowed by an
effort, stretching his neck each time. His eyes expressed an animal
satisfaction. He turned the corner of Judd Street biting again at the
roll, and the reader of this story, like the Lewishams, hears of him
no more.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE GLAMOUR FADES.
After all, the rosy love-making and marrying and Epithalamy are no
more than the dawn of things, and to follow comes all the spacious
interval of white laborious light. Try as we may to stay those
delightful moments, they fade and pass remorselessly; there is no
returning, no recovering, only--for the foolish--the vilest peep-shows
and imitations in dens and darkened rooms. We go on--we grow. At least
we age. Our young couple, emerging presently from an atmosphere of
dusk and morning stars, found the sky gathering greyly overhead and
saw one another for the first time clearly in the light of every-day.
It might perhaps witness better to Lewisham's refinement if one could
tell only of a moderated and dignified cooling, of pathetic little
concealments of disappointment and a decent maintenance of the
sentimental atmosphere. And so at last daylight. But our young couple
were too crude for that. The first intimations of their lack of
identity have already been described, but it would be tedious and
pitiful to tell of all the little intensifications, shade by shade, of
the conflict of their individualities. They fell out, dear lady! they
came to conflict of words. The stress of perpetual worry was upon
them, of dwindling funds and the anxious search for work that would
not come. And on Ethel lay long, vacant, lonely hours in dull
surroundings. Differences arose from the most indifferent things; one
night Lewisham lay awake in unfathomable amazement because she had
convinced him she did not care a rap for the Welfare of Humanity, and
deemed his Socialism a fancy and an indiscretion. And one Sunday
afternoon they started fo
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