In most things I claim to be no wiser than my fellow-men, but in this I knew myself wiser; I knew where I was cheated.  I knew that the schoolmaster who cost me thirty pounds a year was a licensed footpad; half the money spent in restaurants and tea-shops was blackmail paid to respectability; the landlord who took his forty-five pounds a year from my pocket was a mere robber, who took advantage of the need I had to live in a certain locality that I might attend to my vocation.  Not only were my brains exploited that my employer might maintain a sumptuous house at Kensington, but the wage he paid me was exploited by a host of other people, who had houses of their own to maintain.  Before I could feed my children I must help to pay for and cook the dinner of the folk who lived on the dividends of railways and omnibus companies.  On the way to my office the tailor took toll of me by forcing me to wear a garb which I detested, simply because I dared wear no other garb.  I could not even drink plain water but that some one was the richer.  I was the common gull of the thing called convention.  I was plucked to the skin, and if my skin had been worth turning into leather, some one would have put in a claim to that.  Even for my skin, poor asset as it was, some one did wait, when it had ceased to be of use to me, for London cemeteries declare dividends upon the dead.  My case reminded me of an old gentleman I once knew, who wore so many coats, waistcoats, and shirts to keep warmth in a body of singular attenuation, that it was commonly said that by the time James Smith undressed at night there was very little James Smith that was discoverable.  Certainly by the time London had done wringing gold out of me there was very little gold left that was my own.

There was, however, one kind of comfort to be deduced from these reflections; if I was not nearly so well off as I appeared to be, I had all the less to lose.  Rightly considered it would not be 250 pounds per annum that I should lose by leaving London, for I had never possessed that sum, I calculated my real loss at something nearer 150 pounds, and this seemed not so terrible a thing.  I had my forty pounds a year for certain.  I had the small earnings of my pen, and with abundant time upon my hands I saw every reason why these should be increased.  Could I face a new kind of life upon an income of seventy pounds per annum?  Ah, how anxiously that problem was debated with my wife, many a night when the children were abed!  The natural conservatism of woman had a great deal to say in these debates.  ’It was all very well,’ said my wife, ’to do these little sums on paper, but suppose the facts did not correspond?  Suppose I found no cottage at twenty pounds a year, and no decent school at sixpence a week?  Then the world was full of writers for the press.’ (I frowned.) ’Not of course like you, not half so good,’ she added with a smile, ’but how do you know that you will succeed?  Show me a fixed income of 100 pounds a year, and I would chance it, for I can live simply enough,’ she would say, ‘and am as fond of liberty as you.’