fiercely firm: she was perfectly determined he should never go into a small shop. She would rather see him a bricklayer or a costermonger than dedicated to a retail business, tying up candles at a grocer’s or giving change for a shilling across a counter. She would rather, she declared on one occasion, see him articled to a shoemaker or a tailor. A stationer in a neighbouring street had affixed to his window a written notice that he was in want of a smart errand-boy, and Pinnie, on hearing of it, had presented Hyacinth to his consideration. The stationer was a dreadful bullying man with a patch over his eye, who seemed to think the boy would be richly remunerated with three shillings a week; a contemptible measure, as it seemed to the dressmaker, of his rare abilities and acquirements. His schooling had been desultory, precarious, and had had a certain continuity mainly in his early years, while he was under the care of an old lady who combined with the functions of pew-opener at a neighbouring church the manipulation, in the Place itself, where she resided with her sister, a monthly nurse, of such pupils as could be spared (in their families) from the more urgent exercise of holding the baby and fetching the beer. Later, for a twelvemonth, Pinnie had paid five shillings a week for him at an “Academy” in a genteel part of Islington, where there was an “instructor in the foreign languages,” a platform for oratory and a high social standard, but where Hyacinth suffered from the fact that almost all his mates were the sons of dealers in edible articles—pastry-cooks, grocers and fishmongers—and in this capacity subjected him to pangs and ignominious contrasts by bringing to school, for their exclusive consumption or for exchange and barter, various buns, oranges, spices and marine animals, which the boy, with his hands in his empty pockets and the sense of a savourless home in his heart, was obliged to see devoured without his participation. Miss Pynsent would not have pretended he was highly educated in the technical sense of the word, but she believed that at fifteen he had read almost every book in the world. The limits of his reading had been in fact only the limits of his opportunity. Mr. Vetch, who talked with him more and more as he grew older, knew this, and lent him every volume he possessed or could pick up for the purpose. Reading was his extravagance, while the absence of any direct contact with a library represented for him mainly the hard shock of the real; the shock, that is, he could most easily complain of. Mr. Vetch believed him subtly intelligent, and therefore thought it a woeful pity that he couldn’t have furtherance in some liberal walk; but he would have thought it a greater pity still that a youth with that expression in his eyes should be condemned to measure tape or cut slices of cheese. He himself had no influence he could bring into play, no connexion with the great world of capital or the market of labour.