in the department of the utterly contemptible; he had vowed he would be the dunce of Cervantes’s school rather than top-boy in the academy of A Bad Un to Beat and Millicent’s Marriage.  And with this purpose he had devoted himself to laborious and joyous years, so that however mean his capacity, the pains should not be wanting.  He tried now to rouse himself from a growing misery by the recollection of this high aim, but it all seemed hopeless vanity.  He looked out into the grey street, and it stood a symbol of his life, chill and dreary and grey and vexed with a horrible wind.  There were the dull inhabitants of the quarter going about their common business; a man was crying “mackerel” in a doleful voice, slowly passing up the street, and staring into the white-curtained “parlors,” searching for the face of a purchaser behind the India-rubble plants, stuffed birds, and piles of gaudy gilt books that adorned the windows.  One of the blistered doors over the way banged, and a woman came scurrying out on some errand, and the garden gate shrieked two melancholy notes as she opened it and let it swing back after her.  The little patches called gardens were mostly untilled, uncared for, squares of slimy moss, dotted with clumps of coarse ugly grass, but here and there were the blackened and rotting remains of sunflowers and marigolds.  And beyond, he knew, stretched the labyrinth of streets more or less squalid, but all grey and dull, and behind were the mud pits and the steaming heaps of yellowish bricks, and to the north was a great wide cold waste, treeless, desolate, swept by bitter wind.  It was all like his own life, he said again to himself, a maze of unprofitable dreariness and desolation, and his mind grew as black and hopeless as the winter sky.  The morning went thus dismally till twelve o’clock, and he put on his hat and great-coat.  He always went out for an hour every day between twelve and one; the exercise was a necessity, and the landlady made his bed in the interval.  The wind blew the smoke from the chimneys into his face as he shut the door, and with the acrid smoke came the prevailing odor of the street, a blend of cabbage-water and burnt bones and the faint sickly vapor from the brickfields.  Lucian walked mechanically for the hour, going eastward, along the main road.  The wind pierced him, and the dust was blinding, and the dreariness of the street increased his misery.  The row of common shops, full of common things, the blatant public-houses, the Independent chapel, a horrible stucco parody of a Greek temple with a facade of hideous columns that was a nightmare, villas like smug Pharisees, shops again, a church in cheap Gothic, an old garden blasted and riven by the builder, these were the pictures of the way.  When he got home again he flung himself on the bed, and lay there stupidly till sheer hunger roused him.  He ate a hunch of bread and drank some water, and began to pace up and down the room, wondering whether there were no escape from despair.  Writing seemed quite impossible, and hardly knowing what he did he opened his bureau and took out a book from the shelves.  As his eyes fell on the page the air grew dark and heavy as night, and the wind wailed suddenly, loudly, terribly.