ldn't get over. The particular bitterness of his cup was
his having let himself in for a struggle on such terms--the use, on
her side, of the vulgarest process known to the law: the vulgarest, the
vulgarest, he kept repeating that, clinging to the help rendered him by
this imputation to his terrorist of the vice he sincerely believed he
had ever, among difficulties (for oh he recognised the difficulties!)
sought to keep most alien to him. He knew what he was, in a dismal,
down-trodden sphere enough--the lean young proprietor of an old business
that had itself rather shrivelled with age than ever grown fat, the
purchase and sale of second-hand books and prints, with the back street
of a long-fronted south-coast watering-place (Old Town by good luck) for
the dusky field of his life. But he had gone in for all the education he
could get--his educated customers would often hang about for more talk
by the half-hour at a time, he actually feeling himself, and almost with
a scruple, hold them there; which meant that he had had (he couldn't be
blind to that) natural taste and had lovingly cultivated and formed it.
Thus, from as far back as he could remember, there had been things all
round him that he suffered from when other people didn't; and he had
kept most of his suffering to himself--which had taught him, in a
manner, _how_ to suffer, and how almost to like to.

So, at any rate, he had never let go his sense of certain differences,
he had done everything he could to keep it up--whereby everything that
was vulgar was on the wrong side of his line. He had believed, for a
series of strange, oppressed months, that Kate Cookham's manners
and tone were on the right side; she had been governess--for young
children--in two very good private families, and now had classes in
literature and history for bigger girls who were sometimes brought by
their mammas; in fact, coming in one day to look over his collection of
students' manuals, and drawing it out, as so many did, for the evident
sake of his conversation, she had appealed to him that very first time
by her apparently pronounced intellectual side--goodness knew she didn't
even then by the physical!--which she had artfully kept in view till she
had entangled him past undoing. And it had all been but the cheapest of
traps--when he came to take the pieces apart a bit--laid over a brazen
avidity. What he now collapsed for, none the less--what he sank down on
a chair at a table and nu