“That’s no coat o’ mine, Lyddy,” he said.

    Thyrza broke into a laugh.

    “Why, whose is it, then?” she exclaimed.  “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, Christmas 1904, p. 27; and Monthly Review, vol. xvi.  ’He went straight by sea to the land of his dreams—­Italy.  It was still happily before the enterprise of touring agencies had fobbed the idea of Italian travel of its last vestiges of magic.  He spent as much time as he could afford about the Bay of Naples, and then came on with a rejoicing heart to Rome—­Rome, whose topography had been with him since boyhood, beside whose stately history the confused tumult of the contemporary newspapers seemed to him no more than a noisy, unmeaning persecution of the mind.  Afterwards he went to Athens.’]