“Never did I imagine any one so idle; he is fairly putrid with idleness,” said Hall after a short visit.  “Would you believe it, he has only ninepence for sole shield between him and starvation.  The editor of the Moon has just telegraphed for the notice he should have written of the Academy, and the brute is just sending a ‘wire’—­’nothing possible this week.’  Did any one ever hear of such a thing?  To-night he won’t dine, and he could write the notice in an hour.”

Besides having contributed to almost every paper in London, from the Times downwards, Sands had held positions as editor and sub-editor of numerous journals.  But he had lost each one in turn, and was beginning to understand that he was fated to die of poverty, and was beginning to grow tired of the useless struggle.  No one was better organized to earn his living than Peter Sands, and no one failed more lamentably.  Had fortune provided him with a dinner at Simpson’s, a cigar and a cup of coffee, he would have lived as successfully as another.  But our civilization is hard upon those who are only conversationalists, it does not seem to have taken them into account in its scheme, and, in truth, Peter could not do much more than aestheticize agreeably.

Paul L’Estrange admitted freely that he was not fitted for a lawyer; but even before he explained that he considered himself one of those beings who had slipped into a hole that did not fit them, it was probable that you had already begun to consider the circumstances that had brought him to choose the law as a profession; for his vague intelligence “where nothing was and all things seemed,” lay mirrored in his mild eyes like a landscape in a pool.  Over such a partial and meditative a mind as L’Estrange’s, the Temple may exercise a destructive fascination; and since the first day, when a boy he had walked through the closes gathering round the church, and had heard of the knights, had seen the old dining-hall with its many inscriptions, he had never ceased to dream of the Temple—­that relic of the past, saved with all its traditions out of the ruin of time; and the memory of his cousin’s chambers, and the association and mutuality of the life of the Temple, the picturesqueness of the wigs and gowns passing, and the uncommonness of it all had taken root and grown, overshadowing other ideals, and when the time came for him to choose a profession, no choice was open to him but the law, for the law resided in the Temple.

Soon after his father died, the family property was sold and the family scattered; some went to Australia, some to Canada; but L’Estrange had inherited a hundred a year from a grand-aunt, and he lived on that, and what he made by writing in the newspapers, for of course no one had thought of intrusting him with a brief; and what he made by journalism varied from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty a year.  Whenever a new scare arose he was busy among blue-books in the library.