rom one's conscience that her chance
could be at the best but one of the degrees of privation; whether, too,
otherwise, marrying for money mightn't after all be a smaller cause of
shame than the mere dread of marrying without. Through these variations
of mood and view, all the same, the mark on his forehead stood clear;
he saw himself remain without whether he married or not. It was a line
on which his fancy could be admirably active; the innumerable ways of
making money were beautifully present to him; he could have handled
them, for his newspaper, as easily as he handled everything. He was
quite aware how he handled everything; it was another mark on his
forehead; the pair of smudges from the thumb of fortune, the brand on
the passive fleece, dated from the primal hour and kept each other
company. He wrote, as for print, with deplorable ease; since there had
been nothing to stop him even at the age of ten, so there was as little
at twenty; it was part of his fate in the first place and part of the
wretched public's in the second. The innumerable ways of making money
were, no doubt, at all events, what his imagination often was busy with
after he had tilted his chair and thrown back his head with his hands
clasped behind it. What would most have prolonged that attitude,
moreover, was the reflection that the ways were ways only for others.
Within the minute, now--however this might be--he was aware of a nearer
view than he had yet quite had of those circumstances on his
companion's part that made least for simplicity of relation. He saw
above all how she saw them herself, for she spoke of them at present
with the last frankness, telling him of her visit to her father and
giving him, in an account of her subsequent scene with her sister, an
instance of how she was perpetually reduced to patching up, in one way
or another, that unfortunate woman's hopes.

"The tune," she exclaimed, "to which we're a failure as a family!" With
which he had it again all from her--and this time, as it seemed to him,
more than all: the dishonour her father had brought them, his folly and
cruelty and wickedness; the wounded state of her mother, abandoned,
despoiled and helpless, yet, for the management of such a home as
remained to them, dreadfully unreasonable too; the extinction of her
two young brothers--one, at nineteen, the eldest of the house, by
typhoid fever, contracted at a poisonous little place, as they had
afterwards found out, tha