‘This is wrong and cruel—­dreadfully cruel!’ cried the latter, with tears in her eyes.

‘It is; but that’s no new thing,’ was the bitter reply.

’I think it’s wrong of you, Nicholas.  What need is there to say anything about that ten pounds?  It’s taking the food out of our mouths.’

Knowing only the letter of the law, Mr. Peak answered sternly: 

’My income is a hundred and one pounds.  I can’t sign my name to a lie.’

Picture the man.  Tall, gaunt, with sharp intellectual features, and eyes of singular beauty, the face of an enthusiast—­under given circumstances, of a hero.  Poorly clad, of course, but with rigorous self-respect; his boots polished, propria manu, to the point of perfection; his linen washed and ironed by the indefatigable wife.  Of simplest tastes, of most frugal habits, a few books the only luxury which he deemed indispensable; yet a most difficult man to live with, for to him applied precisely the description which Robert Burns gave of his own father; he was ’of stubborn, ungainly integrity and headlong irascibility’.

Ungainly, for his strong impulses towards culture were powerless to obliterate the traces of his rude origin.  Born in a London alley, the son of a labourer burdened with a large family, he had made his way by sheer force of character to a position which would have seemed proud success but for the difficulty with which he kept himself alive.  His parents were dead.  Of his brothers, two had disappeared in the abyss, and one, Andrew, earned a hard livelihood as a journeyman baker; the elder of his sisters had married poorly, and the younger was his blind pensioner.  Nicholas had found a wife of better birth than his own, a young woman with country kindred in decent circumstances, though she herself served as nursemaid in the house of the medical man who employed her future husband.  He had taught himself the English language, so far as grammar went, but could not cast off the London accent; Mrs. Peak was fortunate enough to speak with nothing worse than the note of the Midlands.

His bent led him to the study of history, politics, economics, and in that time of military outbreak he was frenzied by the conflict of his ideals with the state of things about him.  A book frequently in his hands was Godwin’s Political Justice, and when a son had been born to him he decided to name the child after that favourite author.  In this way, at all events, he could find some expression for his hot defiance of iniquity.

He paid his income-tax, and felt a savage joy in the privation thus imposed upon his family.  Mrs. Peak could not forgive her husband, and in this case, though she had but dim appreciation of the point of honour involved, her censures doubtless fell on Nicholas’s vulnerable spot; it was the perversity of arrogance, at least as much as honesty, that impelled him to incur taxation.  His wife’s perseverance in complaint drove him to stern impatience, and for a long time the peace of the household suffered.