word wherewith to avert his sarcasm."

Then I recurred to the other letter: that struck a chord whose sound I
could not deaden by thrusting my fingers into my ears, for it vibrated
within; and though its swell might be exquisite music, its cadence was a
groan.

That Frances was relieved from the pressure of want, that the curse of
excessive labour was taken off her, filled me with happiness; that her
first thought in prosperity should be to augment her joy by sharing
it with me, met and satisfied the wish of my heart. Two results of her
letter were then pleasant, sweet as two draughts of nectar; but applying
my lips for the third time to the cup, and they were excoriated as with
vinegar and gall.

Two persons whose desires are moderate may live well enough in Brussels
on an income which would scarcely afford a respectable maintenance for
one in London: and that, not because the necessaries of life are so
much dearer in the latter capital, or taxes so much higher than in the
former, but because the English surpass in folly all the nations on
God's earth, and are more abject slaves to custom, to opinion, to
the desire to keep up a certain appearance, than the Italians are to
priestcraft, the French to vain-glory, the Russians to their Czar, or
the Germans to black beer. I have seen a degree of sense in the modest
arrangement of one homely Belgian household, that might put to shame the
elegance, the superfluities, the luxuries, the strained refinements of
a hundred genteel English mansions. In Belgium, provided you can
make money, you may save it; this is scarcely possible in England;
ostentation there lavishes in a month what industry has earned in a
year. More shame to all classes in that most bountiful and beggarly
country for their servile following of Fashion; I could write a chapter
or two on this subject, but must forbear, at least for the present. Had
I retained my 60l. per annum I could, now that Frances was in possession
of 50l., have gone straight to her this very evening, and spoken out the
words which, repressed, kept fretting my heart with fever; our united
income would, as we should have managed it, have sufficed well for
our mutual support; since we lived in a country where economy was not
confounded with meanness, where frugality in dress, food, and furniture,
was not synonymous with vulgarity in these various points. But the
placeless usher, bare of resource, and unsupported by connections, must
not th