Three years have passed; years to which in later life Edward Beaumont looked back with loathing and with wonder, wonder that in so short a time he should have not merely fallen from that fair place he had filled in the eye of what was to him the world, but worse, infinitely worse, have fallen from his purer, better, nobler self; years in which, merged, well-nigh submerged, in London’s restless, ruthless sea, he had struggled to keep body and soul together by the use of his pen. When first he had come to town he could, doubtless, have obtained employment as a managing clerk. There are hundreds of men of his profession who are glad to earn the bread of dependence in that capacity; but a false pride forbade him to serve as clerk, who had so recently kinged it in his own office. So he had turned to that refuge of the educated out-of-work—literature—to find, as thousands have found before, that literature is, perhaps, the hardest of all professions. And yet it seems so easy a thing to start in life as a writer; all you need is a J pen, a few sheets of foolscap, and, yes, there’s the rub, something to write about that people want to read about; and, given all that, he’s a lucky man that does not find someone else has forestalled him and has written on the same theme infinitely better than he can write himself. Beaumont, in those days, often recalled the three ways in which, according to the traditions of the Bar, a young barrister may rise rapidly: by writing a book on some legal subject, by huggery—_id est_—by marrying an attorney’s daughter, or by a miracle. For the man who must needs write daily for his daily crust it is not easy to write a book, certainly not easy to find an appreciative publisher; as for huggery, or marrying an editor’s daughter editor’s daughters look far beyond the out-at elbows penny-a-liner; and as for miracles, well, he had never believed in them. Indeed, in these days he had ceased to believe in anything or anybody, even in himself. It was the worst of his misfortunes that he had lost, as it were, at one fell swoop, everything, even the desire to succeed. If he could earn enough to keep life within him, though why he should care even to do that he would have been hard put to it to say, that would suffice. He who loses fortune loses much, who loses friends loses more, but who loses courage loses all. And Beaumont’s heart was dead within him.