He was some way ahead in his downward career when he married her. The addition his marriage made to his expenses quickened his pace, as an object, rolling slowly at first, improves its velocity in proportion to the increase of its distance from the starting-point. One by one his patients deserted him. He insulted his landlord, to whom he owed money, who gave him notice to quit. He then hired the little house in which we have found him, and was now illustrating one of the great mysteries of social life--the mystery of living without money, of keeping a house over his head without a shilling in his pocket, of wearing boots and coats without the means in his purse to pay off the milkman’s sixpenny score. How is this done? There are people doing it every day. They are doing more: they are keeping men-servants, renting big houses, wearing fine dresses, frequenting fashionable haunts, on nothing a year. How Thackeray puzzled over this problem! How Dickens tried to explain it and failed: for he is always driven to a last moment, when some good genius steps forward to help. Imagination can’t deal with a feat which makes nothing do the work of a great deal. There is no doubt something aggressive, even to good nature, in the brooding melancholy that goes about its duties lifelessly, which gives spiritless attention to matters of moment and significance, which looks complaint without speaking it, and addresses itself to every task of life with an air of reproachful endurance. A man possessed of such an inflammable temper as Conway would be constantly taking fire in the presence of such a melancholy; and it must be confessed that Dolly embodied the part with some degree of completeness. Silent and mournful submission to fate was the wrong attitude to assume towards a man in whom was a good deal of the fool. A powerful virago, with muscular arms and a venomous tongue, would have kept him to his work and out of the taverns by the irresistible influence of words supported by finger-nails. Dolly, whose heart was never with him, soon learned to despise him. It is true that she endeavoured, at the beginning of their married life, to win him from his extravagant and reckless courses by entreaties and the mild persuasion of caresses; but she soon ceased her appeals on finding that they took no effect, and only rarely alluded to his habits, which, having plunged them into poverty, were keeping them there, and sinking them lower and lower each day.