Finally, she went to London to try if personal interviews would bring her any better success. She stayed in a house attached to a brewery (Whitbread's), belonging to a cousin of hers, and situated near the City Road. Thence, she tramped about through the mud and sleet of December to the publishers' offices day after day for nearly three weeks. The result was always failure. But though she returned to the house worn-out and dispirited, her determination that the work should be done never wavered, and night after night she sat up till long after the brewery clock struck twelve, the pen pushing on in her trembling hand, preparing the first two numbers of the series, to be ready for publication when the means should be found. It was the kind friend who had helped her before who came to the rescue at last at this crisis. Mr. W. J. Fox induced his brother Charles to make her proposals for publishing her series. Mr. Charles Fox took care to offer only such arrangement as should indemnify him from all risk in the undertaking. He required, first, that five hundred subscribers should be obtained for the work; and second, that he, the publisher, should receive about seventy-five per cent of the possible profits. Hopeless of anything better, she accepted these hard terms, and it was arranged that the first number should appear with February, 1832. The original stipulation as to the time that this agreement should run was that the engagement should be terminable by either party at the end of every five numbers. But a few days afterwards, when Harriet called upon Mr. W. J. Fox to show him her circular inviting subscribers for the series, she found that Mr. Charles Fox had decided to say that he would not publish more than two numbers, unless a thousand copies of No. I were sold in the first fortnight! This decision had been arrived at chiefly in consequence of a conversation which W. J. Fox had held with James Mill, in which the distinguished political economist had pronounced against the essential point of the scheme--the narrative form--and had advised that, if the young lady must try her hand at Political Economy, she should write it in the orthodox didactic style. Mr. Fox lived at Dalston. When Harriet left his house, after receiving this unreasonable and discouraging ultimatum, she "set out to walk the four miles and a half to the Brewery. I could not afford to ride more or less; but, weary already, I now felt almost too ill to walk at all. On the road, not far from Shoreditch, I became too giddy to stand without some support; and I leaned over some dirty palings, pretending to look at a cabbage-bed, but saying to myself as I stood with closed eyes, 'My book will do yet.'"