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Do you know what it is to be poor? Not poor with the arrogant poverty – certain people complain of who have five or six thousand a year to live upon; who yet swear they can hardly manage to make both ends meet. I mean really poor – downright, cruelly, hideously poor, with a poverty that is graceless, sordid and miserable. Poverty that compels you to dress in your one suit of clothes till it is worn threadbare. That denies you clean linen on account of the ruinous charges of washerwomen[1]. That robs you of your own self-respect, and causes you to slink along the streets vaguely abashed, instead of walking erect among your friends in independent ease. This is the sort of poverty I mean. This is the curse; this is the moral cancer that eats into the heart of any human creature and makes him envious and malignant. When he sees the fat idle woman passing by in her luxurious carriage, lolling back lazily, when he observes the brainless and sensual man smoking and dawdling away the hours in the Park, then the blood in him turns to gall, and his suffering spirit rises in fierce rebellion, crying out,
“Why in God’s name, should this injustice be? Why should a worthless lounger have his pockets full of gold by chance and heritage, while I, toiling wearily from morning till midnight, can scarce afford myself a satisfying meal?”
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They seemed a trifle surprised at this, but were too discreet to offer any remark. They wrote down my address at the Grand Hotel, and sent their clerk to show me to the door. I gave this man half-a-sovereign to drink my health which he very cheerfully promised to do. Then I walked away.
In turning a corner I jostled up against a man, the very publisher who had returned me my rejected manuscript the day before.
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