ving to his countenance the form of a parallelogram, to which there
belonged a certain meanness of expression. He wanted the roundness of
forehead, the short lines, and the graceful curves of face which are
necessary to unadorned manly comeliness. His whiskers were small,
grizzled, and ill grown, and required the ample relief of his wig.
In no guise did he look other than a clever man; but in his dress as
a simple citizen he would perhaps be taken as a clever man in whose
tenderness of heart and cordiality of feeling one would not at first
sight place implicit trust.

As a poor man Mr. Furnival had done his duty well by his wife and
family,--for as a poor man he had been blessed with four children.
Three of these had died as they were becoming men and women, and now,
as a rich man, he was left with one daughter, an only child. As a
poor man Mr. Furnival had been an excellent husband, going forth
in the morning to his work, struggling through the day, and then
returning to his meagre dinner and his long evenings of unremitting
drudgery. The bodily strength which had supported him through his
work in those days must have been immense, for he had allowed himself
no holidays. And then success and money had come,--and Mrs. Furnival
sometimes found herself not quite so happy as she had been when
watching beside him in the days of their poverty.

The equal mind,--as mortal Delius was bidden to remember, and as Mr.
Furnival might also have remembered had time been allowed him to
cultivate the classics,--the equal mind should be as sedulously
maintained when things run well, as well as when they run hardly;
and perhaps the maintenance of such equal mind is more difficult in
the former than in the latter stage of life. Be that as it may, Mr.
Furnival could now be very cross on certain domestic occasions, and
could also be very unjust. And there was worse than this,--much worse
behind. He, who in the heyday of his youth would spend night after
night poring over his books, copying out reports, and never asking to
see a female habiliment brighter or more attractive than his wife's
Sunday gown, he, at the age of fifty-five, was now running after
strange goddesses! The member for the Essex Marshes, in these his
latter days, was obtaining for himself among other successes the
character of a Lothario; and Mrs. Furnival, sitting at home in her
genteel drawing-room near Cavendish Square, would remember with
regret the small dingy parlou