‘“Come and see me as often as you like, so long as you do not talk to me of my husband,” she said a little later. “But if you insist upon talking about him, I shall shut my door upon you.” ‘“I hear he has acted most generously with regard to the settlements, so he cannot be altogether bad,” I said--for you know I am not easily put down--but Laura was adamant. I could not extort another word from her. ‘Perhaps I ought not to tell you this, Ned, knowing what I do about your former affection for Laura; but I felt that I must open my heart to somebody. Parents are so stupid that it’s impossible to tell them things. ‘I can’t conceive what this poor girl is going to do with her life. He has settled the whole estate upon her, papa says, and she is awfully rich. But she is living like a hermit, and not spending more than her own small income. She even talks of selling the carriage horses, Tommy and Harry, or sending them back to the plough, though I know she dotes upon them. If this is meanness, it is too awful. If she has conscientious scruples about spending John Treverton’s money, it is simply idiotic. Of the two, I could rather think my friend a miser than an idiot. ‘And now, my dear Ned, as there is nothing else to tell you about the dismalest place in the universe, I may as well say good-bye.--Your loving sister, ‘CELIA.’ ‘P.S.--I hope you are writing a book of poems that will make the Laureate burst with envy. I have no personal animosity to him; but you are my brother, and, of course, your interest must be paramount.’ This letter reached Edward Clare in his dingy lodgings, in a narrow side street near the British Museum, lodgings so dingy that it would have grieved the heart of his country-born and country-bred mother to see her boy in such a den. But the apartments were quite dear enough for his slender means. The world had not yet awakened to the stupendous fact that a new poet had been born into it. Stupid reviewers went on prosing about Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne, and the name of Clare was still unknown, even though it had appeared pretty often at the foot of a neat triplet of verses filling an odd page in a magazine. ‘I shall never win a name in the magazines,’ the young man told himself. ‘It is worse than not writing at all. I shall rot unknown in my garret, or die of hunger and opium, like that poor boy who perished within a quarter of a mile of this dismal hole, unless I can get some rich publisher to launch me properly.’