The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 173: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

156 THE COURT OF LONDON deplore his miserable stupidity in yielding himself up so completely to the Circean wiles and siren blandishments of that titled profligate who had thus taken so large a share in accomplishing his ruin. Half-maddened, then, was Emmerson as he sat at noon in his own private office, looking over his letters and obtain- ing a deeper insight into his perplexities as he advanced step by step down the precipice which that correspondence thus developed to his views. And while all these fearful things were forced upon his contemplation, through the whole cloud of miseries penetrated the thought of his as- tounding folly in respect to Lady Curzon. And how humili- ated, how profoundly humiliated, did he now feel when he reflected that the haughty peeress, so far from ever loving him, the plebeian money-grubber, had been making a tool and an instrument of him the whole time; and that 1f she had encouraged him to quit the dingy regions of the City in order to enter the paradise of West End fashion, the portals of which had unfolded their wings at her magic touch to give him admission, it was only because the enchantress had her own selfish purposes to serve. For he felt, full keenly felt, that those golden gates of high hfe’s Elysium would now be as sternly and mercilessly closed against him as the doors of a workhouse are to a pauper who has no settlement in the parish; and he almost gnashed his teeth with rage as he reflected that, although he had paid thousands of pounds for the privilege of basking in the sunlight of patrician beauty and mingling with the other gilded insects that flitted about in the roseate floods of luxury, yet that he was only a plebeian intruder and vulgar interloper, after all. Such was Emmerson’s state of mind on the day of which we are now writing. Having gone through all his corre- spondence, as a man traverses a district where nature pre- sents nought save features. of horror, gloom, and danger, unrelieved by a single spot of refreshing verdure or floral colouring, he started from his seat and began pacing the room with rapid but uneven steps. What was he to do? Should he become bankrupt, pass through the ordeal of that tribunal so humbling to com- mercial pride, so ruinous to the credit of the money-grubber, and then seek to begin the world anew? Or should he gather together such wrecks of his late immense resources as he Gomichdoo cS ico