“Newmarch--Lord Newmarch! Why, that is better still. He’s in the Ministry, a rising young fellow, with the Manchester interest, and a few hundred thousands a-year behind him. He’s your very man; he’ll get you something; a school-inspectorship, or something of that sort, at the very least. What is he, by-the-bye? Education and that sort of thing is his hobby, so, of course, he’s put somewhere, like Dogberry, where there shall be no occasion for such vanities. Ah! I thought so; Foreign Office. He knows about as much of foreign politics, my dear Sir, as my office boy. That’s why he’s put in; that’s the present people’s way.” “I don’t think I should like to ask a favour of Newmarch,” said Edgar, with hesitation; and there suddenly rose in his mind a spiritual presence which he had never before recognised nor expected to see, a something which was Pride. He himself was so unaffectedly surprised by the apparition that he did not know how to encounter it; but sat silent, wondering, and unable to understand the new dilemma in which he found himself. No; Newmarch was the last person of whom he should like to ask a favour, he said to himself. “Is there any one else whom you would like better?” said Mr. Parchemin, somewhat satirically. “So far as we have got, Lord Newmarch’s is much the most practicable aid you could get. Would you prefer to ask your favour from anyone else?” “You are quite right,” said Edgar, rousing himself. “The fact is, I don’t like asking favours at all. I suppose I expected the world to come to me and offer me a living, hat in hand. Of course, it is absurd.” “Lord Newmarch is probably too high and mighty to prefer a friend unless he is sure it will be for the public interest, etc.,” said Mr. Parchemin. “He will say as much, at least, you may be sure of that. And I advise you to be prepared for a great deal of this sort of lofty rubbish; but don’t pay any attention to it. Don’t take offence.” Edgar laughed; but the laugh was unexplainable to anyone but himself. He had not been in the habit of taking offence; he had never borne anybody a grudge, so far as he knew, in his life; but along with the new-born pride which had arisen in him, was the faculty of offence coming too? These were the first fruits of poverty, spectres which had never crossed his sunny pathway before. And though he laughed, not with amusement, but in a kind of dazed acknowledgment of the incongruity of things, the sense of the joke began to fail in Edgar’s mind. The whimsical, pleasant fun of the whole proceeding disappeared before those apparitions of Anger and Pride. Alas, was it possible that such a vulgar material change as the loss of money could bring such evil things into being? His friendly, gentle soul was appalled. He laughed with pain, not with amusement, because of the strange unlikeness of this new state of mind to anything he had known before.