Page:Gissing - The Emancipated, vol. I, 1890.djvu/92

was won; yet again was old time defeated. Then would he discourse his best. Two topics had he: the weather, and "my brother the baronet's place in Lincolnshire." The manner of his monologue on this second and more fruitful subject was really touching. When so fortunate as to have a new listener, he began by telling him or her that he was Ids father's fourth son, and consequently third brother to Sir Grant Musselwhite—"who goes in so much for model-farming, you know." At the hereditary "place in Lincolnshire" he had spent the bloom of his life, which he now looked back upon with tender regrets. lie did not mention the fact that, ;it the age of five and twenty, he had been beguiled from that Arcadia by wily persons who took advantage of his innocent youth, who Initiated him into the metropolitan mysteries which den the soul and deplete the pocket, who finally abandoned him upon the shoal of a youngest brother's allowance when his father d away from the place in Lincolnshire,