contrived to dress upon it; but she did, and, what is more, she never

complained. She was, indeed, sincerely attached to her incompetent

guardian. He had never been unkind; his age spoke for him loudly; there

was something appealing in his whole-souled quest of knowledge and

innocent delight in the smallest mark of admiration; and, though the

lawyer had warned her she was being sacrificed, Julia had refused to add

to the perplexities of Uncle Joseph.

In a large, dreary house in John Street, Bloomsbury, these four dwelt

together; a family in appearance, in reality a financial association.

Julia and Uncle Joseph were, of course, slaves; John, a gentle man with

a taste for the banjo, the music-hall, the Gaiety bar, and the sporting

papers, must have been anywhere a secondary figure; and the cares

and delights of empire devolved entirely upon Morris. That these are

inextricably intermixed is one of the commonplaces with which the bland

essayist consoles the incompetent and the obscure, but in the case of

Morris the bitter must have largely outweighed the sweet. He grudged no

trouble to himself, he spared none to others; he called the servants

in the morning, he served out the stores with his own hand, he took

soundings of the sherry, he numbered the remainder biscuits; painful

scenes took place over the weekly bills, and the cook was frequently

impeached, and the tradespeople came and hectored with him in the back

parlour upon a question of three farthings. The superficial might have

deemed him a miser; in his own eyes he was simply a man who had been

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