Four and a half years later, on a Tuesday night in April 1886, Edwin was reading in an easy-chair in his bedroom. He made a very image of solitary¹ comfort. The easy-chair had been taken from the dining-room, silently, without permission, and Darius had apparently² not noticed its removal. A deep chair designed by some one learned in the poses natural to the mortal body, it was firm where it ought to be firm, and where it ought to yield, there it yielded. By its own angles it threw the head slightly back, and the knees slightly up. Edwin’s slippered³ feet rested on a hassock, and in front of the hassock was a red-glowing gas-stove. That stove, like the easy-chair, had been acquired by Edwin at his father’s expense without his father’s cognisance. It consumed gas whose price swelled⁴ the quarterly bill three times a year, and Darius observed nothing. He had not even entered his son’s bedroom for several years. Each month seemed to limit further his interest in surrounding phenomena⁵, and to centralise more completely all his faculties⁶ in his business. Over Edwin’s head the gas jet flamed through one of Darius’s special private burners, lighting⁷ the page of a little book, one of Cassell’s “National Library,” a new series of sixpenny reprints which had considerably⁸ excited the book-selling and the book-reading worlds, but which Darius had apparently quite ignored, though confronted in his house and in his shop by multitudinous examples of it. Sometimes Edwin would almost be persuaded to think that he might safely indulge any caprice whatever under his father’s nose, and then the old man would notice some unusual trifle, of no conceivable importance, and go into a passion about it, and Maggie would say quietly, “I told you what would be happening one of these days,” which would annoy Edwin. His

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