to grind colours and save half-pence.
--A sudden announcement.

The meal was over; the table had been spread by a window that looked
upon the river. The moon was up: the young men asked for no other
lights; conversation between them--often shifting, often pausing--had
gradually become grave, as it usually does with two companions in youth;
while yet long vistas in the Future stretch before them deep in shadow,
and they fall into confiding talk on what they wish,--what they fear;
making visionary maps in that limitless Obscure.

"There is so much power in faith," said Lionel, "even when faith is
applied but to things human and earthly, that let a man be but firmly
persuaded that he is born to do, some day, what at the moment seems
impossible, and it is fifty to one but what he does it before he dies.
Surely, when you were a child at school, you felt convinced that there
was something in your fate distinct from that of the other boys, whom
the master might call quite as clever,--felt that faith in yourself
which made you sure that you would be one day what you are."

"Well, I suppose so; but vague aspirations and self-conceits must be
bound together by some practical necessity--perhaps a very homely and
a very vulgar one--or they scatter and evaporate. One would think that
rich people in high life ought to do more than poor folks in humble
life. More pains are taken with their education; they have more leisure
for following the bent of their genius: yet it is the poor folks, often
half self-educated, and with pinched bellies, that do three-fourths of
the world's grand labour. Poverty is the keenest stimulant; and poverty
made me say, not 'I will do,' but 'I must.'"

"You knew real poverty in childhood, Frank?"

"Real poverty, covered over with sham affluence. My father was Genteel
Poverty, and my mother was Poor Gentility. The sham affluence went when
my father died. The real poverty then came out in all its ugliness. I
was taken from a genteel school, at which, long afterwards, I
genteelly paid the bills; and I had to support my mother somehow or
other,--somehow or other I succeeded. Alas, I fear not genteelly! But
before I lost her, which I did in a few years, she had some comforts
which were not appearances; and she kindly allowed, dear soul, that
gentility and shams do not go well together. Oh, beware of debt,
Lionello mio; and never call that economy meanness which is but the
safeguard from mean degradation."