The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (6.1895)

The Next Time

36
beer. If there’s dishonour one way and inconvenience the other,
it certainly is comfortable, but it as certainly isn’t glorious, to
have escaped them. People of delicacy don’t brag either about
their probity or about their luck. Success be hanged !—I want to
sell. It’s a question of life and death. I must study the way.
I’ve studied too much the other way—I know the other way
now, every inch of it. I must cultivate the market—it’s a science
like another. I must go in for an infernal cunning. It will be
very amusing, I foresee that ; the bustle of life will become
positively exhilarating. I haven’t been obvious—I must be
obvious. I haven’t been popular—I must be popular. It’s
another art—or perhaps it isn’t an art at all. It’s something else ;
one must find out what it is. Is it something awfully queer ? —
you blush !—something barely decent ? All the greater incentive
to curiosity ! Curiosity’s an immense motive ; we shall have
tremendous larks. They all do it; it’s only a question of how.
Of course I’ve everything to unlearn ; but what is life, as Jane
Highmore says, but a lesson ? I must get all I can, all she can
give me, from Jane. She can’t explain herself much ; she’s all
intuition ; her processes are obscure ; it’s the spirit that swoops
down and catches her up. But I must study her reverently in
her works. Yes, you’ve defied me before, but now my loins are
girded : I declare I’ll read one of them—I really will : I’ll put it
through if I perish ! ”
I won’t pretend that he made all these remarks at once -y
but there wasn’t one that he didn’t make at one time or another,
for suggestion and occasion were plentiful enough, his life being
now given up altogether to his new necessity. It wasn’t a
question of his having or not having, as they say, my intellectual
sympathy : the brute force of the pressure left no room lor judg-
ment ; it made all emotion a mere recourse to the spy-glass. I
watched