Other incidents confirmed this mood. Both Isabel and George Augustus rather pushed George forward to take the brunt of the calamity. Isabel’s first suggestion to George was that he should go as a grocer’s errand boy at three shillings a week, a proposition which George indignantly and properly rejected. Whereupon she called him a parasite and a graceless spendthrift. Probably the suggestion was only hysteria, but it hit hard and rankled. Then, it was George do this, and George do that. It was George who had to interview insolent tradesmen and creditors, and plead for further credit and “time.” It was George who recovered £90 in gold which had been stolen by the office boy, and was refunded. It was George who was sent to persuade his father to come back and face out the storm. It was George who was made to go and collect rents from suspicious and uneasy tenants. It was George who had to see solicitors, and try to get a grasp of the situation. They even accepted his offer of the few pounds (birthday gifts saved up) which he had in the Post Office Savings Bank. Rather a shock for a boy not seventeen, who had been living an _exalté_ inner life, and who had been led to suppose that his material future was assured. It is not wholly surprising that he was very unhappy, a bit resentful, and that his mistrust became permanent, his modesty, diffidence. * * * * * Things went on in this joyless way for about a year. “Disgrace” was avoided, but it was obvious that the Winterbourne opulence was gone, and George Augustus had lost his nerve. It was from this period that the beginnings of his subsequent conversion dated. In defeat he returned to the beliefs of childhood, but some latent unrecognized hostility to the influence of dear Mamma finally led him to the form of Christianity most opposed to hers. As for George, he brooded a great deal and oscillated between moods of hope and exultation and moods of profound depression. They moved nearer to London, and he tried, with very little success, to sell some of his paintings. They were too ambitious and too youthful, with no commercial value. He was all the time uneasily conscious that he ought to “get out” and that his family were anxious for him to “do something.” Kind friends wrote proposing the most dreary and humiliating jobs they could think of. Even Priscilla—a bitter blow—thought that “George should do something _at once_, and in a few years might be earning two pounds a week as a clerk.” Then George made the acquaintance of a journalist, a very uneducated but extremely kindly and good-natured man. Thomas had some sort of sub-editorship in Fleet Street, and generously offered to allow George to do some minor reporting for him, an offer which he jumped at. George did his first job—which was passed—and returned home, naturally very late, in a glow of virtuous exultation, thinking how he would surprise his parents next morning with the news, like a good