Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/803

 In these days of examinations, numbers of men in a poor position—clerks chiefly—conceive a hope that by "passing" this, that, or the other formal test they may open for themselves a new career. Not a few such persons nourish preposterous ambitions; there are warehouse clerks privately preparing (without any means or prospect of them) for a call to the Bar, drapers' assistants who "go in" for the preliminary examination of the College of Surgeons, and untaught men innumerable, who desire to procure enough show of education to be eligible for a curacy. Candidates of this stamp frequently advertise in the newspapers for cheap tuition, or answer advertisements which are intended to appeal to them; they pay from sixpence to half a crown an hour—rarely as much as the latter sum. Occasionally it happened that Harold Biffen had three or four such pupils in hand, and extraordinary stories he could draw from his large experience in this sphere

Biffen Falls in Love

A fatal day. There was an end of all his peace, all his capacity for labor, his patient endurance of penury. Once, when he was about three and twenty, he had been in love with a girl of gentle nature and fair intelligence; on account of his poverty, he could not even hope that his love might be returned, and he went away to bear the misery as best he might. Since then the life he had led precluded the forming of such attachments; it would never have been possible for him to support a wife of however humble origin. At intervals he felt the full weight of his loneliness, but there were happily long periods during which his Greek studies and his efforts in realistic fiction made him indifferent to the curse laid