[Footnote 20:  The Odd Women (1893, new edition, 1894) is a rather sordid and depressing survey of the life-histories of certain orphaned daughters of a typical Gissing doctor—­grave, benign, amiably diffident, terribly afraid of life.  ‘From the contact of coarse actualities his nature shrank.’  After his death one daughter, a fancy-goods shop assistant (no wages), is carried off by consumption; a second drowns herself in a bath at a charitable institution; another takes to drink; and the portraits of the survivors, their petty, incurable maladies, their utter uselessness, their round shoulders and ‘very short legs,’ pimples, and scraggy necks—­are as implacable and unsparing as a Maupassant could wish.  From the deplorable insight with which he describes the nerveless, underfed, compulsory optimism of these poor in spirit and poor in hope Gissing might almost have been an ‘odd woman’ himself.  In this book and The Paying Guest (1895) he seemed to take a savage delight in depicting the small, stiff, isolated, costly, unsatisfied pretentiousness and plentiful lack of imagination which cripples suburbia so cruelly.—­See Saturday Review, 13 Apr. 1896; and see also ib., 19 Jan. 1895.]

[Footnote 21:  The whirlpool in which people just nod or shout to each other as they spin round and round.  The heroine tries to escape, but is drawn back again and again, and nearly submerges her whole environment by her wild clutches.  Satire is lavished upon misdirected education (28), the sluttishness of London landladies, self-adoring Art on a pedestal (256), the delegation of children to underlings, sham religiosity (229), the pampered conscience of a diffident student, and the mensonge of modern woman (300), typified by the ruddled cast-off of Redgrave, who plays first, in her shrivelled paint, as procuress, and then, in her naked hideousness, as blackmailer.]

’At Cotrone the tone of the dining-room was decidedly morose.  One man—­he seemed to be a sort of clerk—­came only to quarrel.  I am convinced that he ordered things which he knew that the people could not cook, just for the sake of reviling their handiwork when it was presented.  Therewith he spent incredibly small sums; after growling and remonstrating and eating for more than an hour, his bill would amount to seventy or eighty centesimi, wine included.  Every day he threatened to withdraw his custom; every day he sent for the landlady, pointed out to her how vilely he was treated, and asked how she could expect him to recommend the Concordia to his acquaintances.  On one occasion I saw him push away a plate of something, plant his elbows on the table, and hide his face in his hands; thus he sat for ten minutes, an image of indignant misery, and when at length his countenance was again visible, it showed traces of tears.’—­(pp. 102-3.)

The unconscious paganism that lingered in tradition, the half-obscured names of the sites celebrated in classic story, and the spectacle of the white oxen drawing the rustic carts of Virgil’s time—­these things roused in him such an echo as Chevy Chase roused in the noble Sidney, and made him shout with joy.  A pensive vein of contemporary reflection enriches the book with passages such as this:—­