, and then of another Seventy piecemeal,
bleedingly, after long delays and under the epistolary whiplash cracked
by the London solicitor in his wretched ear even to an effect of the
very report of Miss Cookham's tongue--these melancholy efforts formed
a scramble up an arduous steep where steps were planted and missed, and
bared knees were excoriated, and clutches at wayside tufts succeeded and
failed, on a system to which poor Nan could have intelligently entered
only if she had been somehow less ladylike. She kept putting into his
mouth the sick quaver of where he should find the rest, the always
inextinguishable rest, long after he had in silent rage fallen away from
any further payment at all--at first, he had but too blackly felt, for
himself, to the still quite possible non-exclusion of some penetrating
ray of "exposure." He didn't care a tuppenny damn now, and in point
of fact, after he had by hook and by crook succeeded in being able to
unload to the tune of Two-Hundred-and-Seventy, and then simply returned
the newest reminder of his outstanding obligation unopened, this latter
belated but real sign of fight, the first he had risked, remarkably
caused nothing at all to happen; nothing at least but his being moved
to quite tragically rueful wonder as to whether exactly some such
demonstration mightn't have served his turn at an earlier stage.

He could by this time at any rate measure his ruin--with three fantastic
mortgages on his house, his shop, his stock, and a burden of interest
to carry under which his business simply stretched itself inanimate,
without strength for a protesting kick, without breath for an appealing
groan. Customers lingering for further enjoyment of the tasteful remarks
he had cultivated the unobstrusive art of throwing in, would at this
crisis have found plenty to repay them, might his wit have strayed a
little more widely still, toward a circuitous egotistical outbreak, from
the immediate question of the merits of this and that author or of the
condition of this and that volume. He had come to be conscious through
it all of strangely glaring at people when they tried to haggle--and
not, as formerly, with the glare of derisive comment on their overdone
humour, but with that of fairly idiotised surrender--as if they were
much mistaken in supposing, for the sake of conversation, that he might
take himself for saveable by the difference between sevenpence and
ninepence. He watched everything i