. "Don't play tricks, grandad;
put it on at once!"

"Now come, come; you're keeping Mary waiting," said Lydia, catching up
the coat and holding it ready.

Then Mr. Boddy understood. He looked from Lydia to Thyrza with dimmed
eyes.

"I've a good mind never to speak to either of you again," he said in a
tremulous voice. "As if you hadn't need enough of your money! Lyddy,
Lyddy! And you're as had, Thyrza, a grownup woman like you; you ought
to teach your sister better. Why, there; it's no good; I don't know
what to say to you. Now what do you think of this, Mary?"

Lydia still held up the coat, and at length persuaded the old man to
don it. The effect upon his appearance was remarkable; conscious of
it, he held himself more upright and stumped to the little square of
looking-glass to try and regard himself. Here he furtively brushed a
hand over his eyes.

"I'm ready, Mary, my dear; I'm ready! It's no good saying anything to
girls like these. Good-bye, Lyddy; good-bye, Thyrza. May you have a
happy Christmas, children! This isn't the first as you've made a happy
one for me."'--(p. 117.)

The anonymously published _Demos_ (1886) can hardly be described as a
typical product of George Gissing's mind and art. In it he subdued himself
rather to the level of such popular producers as Besant and Rice, and went
out of his way to procure melodramatic suspense, an ingredient far from
congenial to his normal artistic temper. But the end justified the means.
The novel found favour in the eyes of the author of _The Lost Sir
Massingberd_, and Gissing for the first time in his life found himself the
possessor of a full purse, with fifty 'jingling, tingling, golden, minted
quid' in it. Its possession brought with it the realisation of a paramount
desire, the desire for Greece and Italy which had become for him, as it had
once been with Goethe, a scarce endurable suffering. The sickness of
longing had wellnigh given way to despair, when 'there came into my hands a
sum of money (such a poor little sum) for a book I had written. It was
early autumn. I chanced to hear some one speak of Naples--and only death
would have held me back.'[10]

[Footnote 10: See _Emancipated_, chaps. iv.-xii.; _New Grub Street_, chap,
xxvii.; _Ryecroft_, Autumn xix.; the short, not superior, novel called
_Sleeping Fires_, 1895, chap. i. 'An encounter on the Kerameikos'; _The
Albany_,