In that case it is no use to talk of it." In despair
you cry, "Well, what will you offer?" with a choking voice. "Fifteen
shillings would be about my figure for it," answers the fiend,
relentless as a machine--and so on.'
'I tried pawning them at first,' he continued, 'because there was hope
of getting them back some time that way; but, trudging from shop to
shop, with many prayers, "a sovereign for the lot" was all I could get.
Worse than dress-clothes!' concluded the frank creature.
For Narcissus to be in debt was nothing new: he had always been so at
school, and probably always will be. Had you reproached him with it in
those young self-conscious days of glorious absurdity, he would probably
have retorted, with a toss of his vain young head:--
'Well, and so was Shelley!'
I ventured to enquire the present difficulty that compelled him to make
sacrifice of things so dear.
'Why, to pay for them, of course,' was the answer.
And so I first became initiated into the mad method by which Narcissus
had such a library about him at twenty-one. From some unexplained
reason, largely, I have little doubt, on account of the charm of his
manners, he had the easy credit of those respectable booksellers to whom
reference has been made above. No extravagance seemed to shake their
confidence. I remember calling upon them with him one day some months
following that afternoon--for the madness, as usual, would have its
time, and no sufferings seemed to teach him prudence--and he took me up
to a certain 'fine set' that he had actually resisted, he said, for a
fortnight.
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