for his newspaper, as easily as he handled every
thing. He was quite aware how he handled every
thing; 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 im
agination 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 pro
longed 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

[[72]]

p071 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p072w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p073

v?