my low estate.  I came now under altered auspices.  To shop at three in the afternoon is to give proof of leisure; behold, in the eyes of obsequious shopmen I had at once become a wealthy dilettante, nurturing the growth of an expensive library, and the rarest books were laid before me with an ingratiating smile.  Let the man who would understand how much the estimates men take of us are based on wealth, or supposed wealth, make the brief experiment of shopping at the rich man’s hour, instead of at the poor man’s; he will be surprised to note the difference of the social atmosphere.  A man’s clothes may be poor enough, and his appearance contemptible, but if he will shop at the hour when all the drudges are at work, no one will take him for a drudge.  I will confess it gave me pleasure to note this change of estimate.  I seemed to taste the first privilege of a freeman, when a pursy bookseller took from a glass case certain expensive books on Art, and drew my attention, with subtle deference to my judgment, to the merits of the pictures they contained.  I may as well confess at once, that so intoxicated was I with the new respect that greeted me, that I even bought one of these volumes, which I did not need, and certainly could not afford.  It was a weakness and a folly, no doubt; but how could I tell my obsequious friend that I paid my guinea not for anything he sold me, but as a sort of first footing on my entrance to the realm of freedom?  I might have spent it much worse, for I bought my self-respect with it.

The sight of my doorstep brought me to my bearings, for a man’s own doorstep is a rare corrective of disordered fancies.  The fact I had to communicate was briefly this; That I had lost 250 pounds per annum, against which I had 50 pounds to show by way of compensation.  Women, I have long noticed—­or women of the best kind, I ought to add—­have much more genius in finance than men.  They have a much keener sense of the use of money; an excellent thing in women when it does not deteriorate into cheese-paring and sordid parsimony.  They, being primitive and unsophisticated creatures, are unacquainted with the lax morals of the cheque-book; a pound is just twenty shillings to them, and each shilling is an entity, and each is spent with an indomitable aim to get the most out of it.  How would my wife regard the definite disappearance of five thousand shillings?  Not with levity, I knew; and I thought it best to say nothing of that guinea volume on the Tombs of the Etruscans.  The Tombs of the Etruscans would have meant to her three pairs of boots; and I wished that I might conceal it in mine.  A wise bishop once argued that marriage was ordained not for man’s pleasure, but his discipline; I believe that he was not far wrong.  It is no use disputing the fact that the married man is always in danger of the judgment; and it is only by some form of bribery that he can hope to escape being cast in damages.  I resolved on bribery, and made