Had he forgotten her and the babe?--found letters to her sometimes a burden, and his heart towards her dry often and barren? Well, he _had_ written regularly; and she had never complained. Men cannot be like women, absorbed for ever in the personal affections. For him it was the day of battle, in which a man must strain all his powers to the uttermost if any laurels are to be won before evening. His whole soul was absorbed in the stress of it, in the hungry eagerness for fame, and--though in a lesser degree--for money.
Money! The very thought of it filled him with impatient worry. Morrison's hundred was nearly gone. He knew well enough that Phoebe was right when she accused him of managing his money badly. It ran through his fingers loosely, incessantly. He hardly knew now where the next remittances to Phoebe were to come from. At first he had done a certain amount of illustrating work and had generally sent her the proceeds of it. But of late he had been absorbed in his big picture, and there had been few or no small earnings. Perhaps, if he hadn't written those articles to the _Mirror_, there would have been time for some? Well, why shouldn't he write them? His irritable pride took fire at once at the thought of blame.
No one could say, anyway, that he had spent money in amusement. Why, he had scarcely been out of Bloomsbury!--the rest of London might not have existed for him. A gallery-seat at the Lyceum Theatre, then in its early fame, and hot discussions of Irving and Ellen Terry with such artistic or literary acquaintance as he had made through the life-school or elsewhere--these had been his only distractions. He stood amazed before his own virtues. He drank little--smoked little. As for women--he thought with laughter or wrath of Phoebe's touch of jealousy! There was an extremely pretty girl--a fair-haired, conscious minx--drawing in the same room with him at the British Museum. Evidently she would have been glad to capture him; and he had loftily denied her. If he had ever been as susceptible as Phoebe thought him, he was susceptible no more. Life burned with sterner fire!
And yet, for all these self-denials, Morrison's money and his own savings were nearly gone. Funds might hold out till after Christmas. What then?