’They spoke a peculiar tongue, the product of sham education and a mock refinement grafted upon a stock of robust vulgarity.  One and all would have been moved to indignant surprise if accused of ignorance or defective breeding.  Ada had frequented an “establishment for young ladies” up to the close of her seventeenth year:  the other two had pursued culture at a still more pretentious institute until they were eighteen.  All could “play the piano”; all declared—­and believed—­that they “knew French.”  Beatrice had “done” Political Economy; Fanny had “been through” Inorganic Chemistry and Botany.  The truth was, of course, that their minds, characters, propensities, had remained absolutely proof against such educational influence as had been brought to bear upon them.  That they used a finer accent than their servants, signified only that they had grown up amid falsities, and were enabled, by the help of money, to dwell above-stairs, instead of with their spiritual kindred below.’

The evils of indiscriminate education and the follies of our grotesque examination system were one of Gissing’s favourite topics of denunciation in later years, as evidenced in this characteristic passage in his later manner in this same book:—­

’She talked only of the “exam,” of her chances in this or that “paper,” of the likelihood that this or that question would be “set.”  Her brain was becoming a mere receptacle for dates and definitions, vocabularies and rules syntactic, for thrice-boiled essence of history, ragged scraps of science, quotations at fifth hand, and all the heterogeneous rubbish of a “crammer’s” shop.  When away from her books, she carried scraps of paper, with jottings to be committed to memory.  Beside her plate at meals lay formulae and tabulations.  She went to bed with a manual, and got up with a compendium.’

The conclusion of this book and its predecessor, The Odd Women,[20] marks the conclusion of these elaborated problem studies.  The inferno of London poverty, social analysis and autobiographical reminiscence, had now alike been pretty extensively drawn upon by Gissing.  With different degrees of success he had succeeded in providing every one of his theses with something in the nature of a jack-in-the-box plot which the public loved and he despised.  There remained to him three alternatives:  to experiment beyond the limits of the novel; to essay a lighter vein of fiction; or thirdly, to repeat himself and refashion old material within its limits.  Necessity left him very little option.  He adopted all three alternatives.  His best success in the third department was achieved in Eve’s Ransom (1895).  Burrowing back into a projection of himself in relation with a not impossible she, Gissing here creates a false, fair, and fleeting beauty of a very palpable charm.  A growing sense of her power to fascinate steadily raises Eve’s standard of the minimum of luxury to which she is entitled.  And in the