Page:Gissing - The Nether World, vol. II, 1889.djvu/154

 Jane. He thinks I’m making a mistake, that I ought to have had the child educated to fit her to live with rich people. It’s no use; I can’t get him to feel what a grand thing it’ll be for Jane to go about among her own people and help them as nobody ever could. He said to me not long ago, ‘And isn’t the girl ever to have a husband?’ It’s my hope that she will, I told him. ‘And do you suppose,’ he went on, ‘that whoever marries her will let her live in the way you talk of? Where are you going to find a working man that’ll be content never to touch this money,—to work on for his weekly wages, when he might be living at his ease?’ And I told him that it wasn’t as impossible as he thought. What do you think, Sidney?”

The communication of a noble idea has the same effect upon the brains of certain men—of one, let us say, in every hundred thousand—as a wine that exalts and enraptures. As Sidney listened to the old man telling of his wondrous vision, he became possessed with ardour such as he had known