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Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/12/2020, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/12/2020, SPi

Fictions of Credit in the

Age of Shakespeare
LAURA KOLB

1
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3
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Acknowledgments

This book has been many years in the making, and I owe many debts of gratitude.
Richard Strier first encouraged me to think about money and language together.
Without his initial astute questioning and continued conversation, Fictions of
Credit would never have come into being. Bradin Cormack pushed me to think
beyond the obvious: to dwell on knotty problems and thorny questions, and to
find beauty in them. Josh Scodel has been a model of scholarly generosity; his
depth of knowledge and readerly insight have benefited this work in countless
ways.
Baruch’s English department has been a welcoming academic home. I am
especially grateful to Jessica Lang, for her steady, clear-eyed mentorship, and to
Mary McGlynn, for her unflagging support. I could not have wished for better
colleagues; special thanks to (among many others) Amina El-Annan, Tim Aubry,
Lisa Blankenship, John Brenkman, Eva Chou, Allison Deutermann, Matt Eatough,
Shelly Eversley, Stephanie Hershinow, Sean O’Toole, Rick Rodriguez, Brooke
Schreiber, Lauren Silberman, Cheryl Smith, Steven Swarbrick, and Nancy
Yousef. It was a delight and an adventure to learn the ropes with Allison
Curseen. My Baruch students’ energy, enthusiasm, and willingness to do new
things with old words have been an inspiration.
I have been fortunate to be able to share portions of this work in a variety of
settings. Early drafts of some of this material received feedback at the Renaissance
Workshop at the University of Chicago and at the Folger Shakespeare Library’s
Researching the Archives dissertation seminar. I am grateful to leaders and
participants in both groups, with special thanks to Michael Murrin and the late
David Bevington, in Chicago, and to Nigel Smith and Peter Lake, at the Folger.
More recently, the Shakespeare Seminar at Columbia University has been a forum
for some of this work. I am grateful for the community that the Seminar fosters
and the writing groups it has spawned. For freely flowing talk (and coffee, and
wine) my thanks to Caralyn Bialo, Dave Hershinow, Gavin Hollis, András Kiséry,
Alex Lash, Zoltán Márkus, Bernadette Myers, Vim Pasupathi, Debapriya Sarkar,
John Staines, and Matt Zarnowiecki. It has also been a joy to share ideas with
J.K. Barret, Adhaar Desai, Lara Dodds, Billy Junker, Lynne Magnusson, Lucy
Munro, Dan Shore, Philip Goldfarb Styrt, Ben VanWagoner, Michael West, and
Jessica Wolfe. Portions of the project received valuable comments in SAA and
BSA seminars, RSA and MLA panels, and an interdisciplinary conference on Early
Modern Debts organized by George Oppitz-Trotman.
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Material support from the Weissman School of Arts and Science’s Dean’s
Office, CUNY’s Research Foundation, PSC-CUNY, the Eugene Lang
Foundation, and CUNY’s Faculty Fellowship Publication Program has facilitated
research for this project. A three-month fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare
Library saw the completion of the first full draft. I am grateful to the Folger
Institute and to the staff of the Library’s reading room. I would also like to thank
the staffs of the Huntington Library, the British Library, the University of
Chicago’s Special Collections, and Columbia University’s Rare Book and
Manuscript Library.
An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared in Shakespeare Studies 44 (2016). Part
of Chapter 3 appeared in SEL 58, no. 2 (Spring 2018). Thanks to both journals for
their permission to use this material here.
I am grateful to everyone at OUP for making this book a reality. Ellie Collins
has been a wonderful editor, offering clarity, support, and insight. The press’s
anonymous readers provided generous, thoughtful, and productive comments
that significantly strengthened the work. Many thanks, also, to Ella Capel-Smith
and Sam Downes for shepherding the book through its final stages, and to Tim
Beck for meticulous copyediting.
Francis Bacon tells us that, if a person “tosseth his Thoughts” to friends, “he
seeth how they looke when they are turned into Words.” For helping my thoughts
become words, and for countless good words of their own, my thanks to Laura
Aydelotte, Greg Baum, Dave Gerrard, Armando Mastrogiovanni, Lindsay
Nordell, Caryn O’Connell, Aleks Prigozhin, Michael Robbins, and Matthew
Schratz, who is also my very dear cousin. Chris Mead offered life-saving advice
and excellent company. Reina Hardy, conjurer, called at least one dream into
existence. Together, Jessica Rosenberg and Megan Heffernan have made up the
smartest, funniest, long-distance book-writing club I could have asked for. Penny
became so involved she required her own desk chair.
Matthew Harrison read every word, often more than once, generally on short
notice. Ana Harrison fed me, made me laugh, kept me afloat. Their friendship has
sustained me through much more than the writing of this book; I cannot pay them
back, but I will gladly rest their debtor.
Conversations with Ben Robinson shaped my thinking on every level. His
enthusiasm for the project, along with the many acts of care he extended to me
while writing it, gave me the faith needed to finish. For the daily joy and sheer
good luck of having Ben in my life, I am grateful beyond measure.
My family has given me more than can be enumerated. To Andrew, Amy,
Kublai, Sasha, and James, and to Margaret, Nick, Calvin, and Emily: boundless
love and gratitude. My parents, Daniel and Kazhia Kolb, filled my earliest world
with words. Their love made everything else possible; this book is dedicated to
them.
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Contents

List of Figures ix
Introduction 1
I.1. Polonius in the Marketplace 1
I.2. Economics and Fiction 11
I.3. “Equipment for Living”: Practical and Dramatic Texts 20
I.4. Archive and Structure 33
1. Reckoning Reputation 37
1.1. Jealous Arithmetic 37
1.2. Partnership Problems 42
1.3. Economic Language in Othello 54
1.4. Credit versus Honor 65
1.5. “For the Seas’ Worth” 74
2. Friendly Credit and its Dangers 77
2.1. Commonplaces, Common Goods 77
2.2. Proverbs and Contradiction 84
2.3. Managing Contradiction in Letter-Writing Manuals 88
2.4. All That Glisters in The Merchant of Venice 98
2.5. Pairs and Networks in A Woman Killed with Kindness 110
3. Debt’s Poetry, Credit’s Fictions 124
3.1. Debt Plus Poetry Equals . . . ? 124
3.2. Timon of Athens: or, The Rich Beggar 128
3.3. Debt’s Poetry 135
3.4. Origin Stories 143
4. Other Worlds 151
4.1. Unpuzzling Credit 151
4.2. The Stuff of Poetry 155
4.3. Volpone’s Will 160
4.4. The Magnetic Lady’s Logarithms 169
4.5. Interest’s Contradictions 183
4.6. “The World Over” 191
Coda 195

Bibliography 201
Index 217
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List of Figures

I.1. Excerpt from “The Ladder to thrift” in Thomas Tusser’s Fiue hundreth
points of good husbandry (London, 1573), sig. C1r. STC 22109, The Folger
Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. 24
I.2. Engraved title page to William Scott, An essay of drapery: or, The compleate
citizen (London, 1635). STC 24377, The Folger Shakespeare Library,
Washington, D.C. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. 30
1.1. Title page of An introduction for to lerne to recken with the pen, or with
the counters (London, 1539). Tanner 55, The Bodleian Library, University
of Oxford. 43
2.1. Nicholas Breton, “A letter to a friend, to Borowe Money,” the first model
epistle in Conceyted letters, newly layde open (London, 1618), sig. A4r.
RB 82001, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. 91
2.2. Title page of Thomas Gainsford, The secretaries studie (London, 1616).
RB 59902, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. 93
4.1. The first breviat in Richard Witt’s Arithmeticall questions (London, 1613),
along with an accompanying practice question (sigs. C3v–C4r). RB 79708,
The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. 177
4.2. One page of the 111-page table of logarithms, from one to 9,999, printed
in Edmund Wingate, Arithmetique made easie in two bookes (London,
1630), sig. N4v. RB 79926, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. 181
4.3. Title page of John Penkethman, The Purchasers Pinnace: or, The Bargainees
Brigantine (London, 1629). STC 19600.8 (folio), The Folger Shakespeare
Library, Washington, D.C. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. 186
4.4. Title page of The money monger: or, The Vsurers Almanacke (London,
1626). Antiq.f.E.13 (1), The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 188
4.5. Title page of The Treasurers Almanacke: or, The Money-Master
(London, 1627). Antiq.f.E.13 (2), The Bodleian Library, University
of Oxford. 189
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Introduction

I.1. Polonius in the Marketplace

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” (1.3.75).¹ Of the “few precepts”

Shakespeare’s Polonius heaps upon his son as he departs for Paris, this piece of
economic counsel stands out as the most straightforward. What could be more
sensible than staying out of debt and refusing loans to others? Hamlet’s first
audiences would have recognized this counsel as directed at themselves, as well
as at the fictional Laertes: in the 1603 first quarto, Polonius’s speech is printed with
commonplace marks, the printer’s signal that this chunk of text can be extracted,
exported, and redeployed in the world beyond the play.² Even without such
markings, the speech would have looked (or sounded) deeply familiar. Polonius’s
heaped-up precepts are instantly recognizable as a certain kind of counsel, in their
style as well as their content. At once aphoristic and dilatory, mingling assertions
with qualifications, his speech rhetorically resembles a great deal of the practical
literature that was central to the operation and dispersal of economic thinking
in the period.³
Yet for Hamlet’s first audiences, “neither a borrower nor a lender be” would
have been difficult if not impossible advice to follow. Limited supplies of hard
currency and expanding market activity meant that, in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, English people used credit far more often than cash.⁴ As the poet
Thomas Tusser put it: “Who liuing but lends, & be lent to they must, / else buying
& selling, mought lye in the dust.”⁵ Tusser’s Fiue hundreth points of good husbandry

¹ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982). Subsequent refer-
ences to Hamlet are from this edition and are to act, scene, and line.
² Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of
Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 2 (Winter 2008): pp. 371–420, esp. pp. 376–8. The
specific injunction against borrowing and lending does not appear in the first quarto’s truncated
version of Polonius’s speech. Like the surrounding precepts, however, this injunction scans as a brief,
pithy, extractable saying.
³ See Louis B. Wright, “Handbook Learning of the Renaissance Middle Class,” Studies in Philology
28, no. 1 (1931): pp. 58–86, esp. p. 70; and Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935; repr.,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 121–200.
⁴ Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early
Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998). See also Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself:
Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015);
and Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000).
⁵ Thomas Tusser, Fiue hundreth points of good husbandry (London, 1573), sig. C3v.

Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare. Laura Kolb, Oxford University Press (2021). © Laura Kolb.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198859697.003.0001
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(1573) primarily offers its rhymed advice to farmers, but it identifies participation in
debt relations as a condition of life for everyone: in early modern England, to live
was to lend and be “lent to,” regardless of profession or status. Credit was a
ubiquitous currency. It was also a profoundly personal one. Before the rise of
modern banking and subsequent development of institutionally determined meas-
ures of creditworthiness, like credit limits and credit scores, credit equaled reputa-
tion. A person’s credit was intimately connected to his or her good name and
community ties: to public perception of virtue and trustworthiness, to verbally
disseminated opinions, to bonds of kin and friendship. Most debts represented
interpersonal bonds with social and affective content alongside their economic
function. Moreover, a single individual might be involved in numerous debt
relations at any given time, operating as one node in a vast network of linked and
crisscrossing bonds. The result is what Craig Muldrew has termed England’s
“culture of credit”: a nexus of social relations, cultural practices, and discursive
forms begotten of economic necessity but extending into every aspect of life.⁶
Polonius goes on to justify his injunction in two ways, claiming that debt
relations both harm friendships and deplete household wealth: “For loan oft
loses both itself and friend, / And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry”
(1.3.76–7). The counselor’s definitive-sounding precepts tell only part of the
story, and once again they prove unworkable as guides to action. Though period
writers do sometimes note the potentially corrosive effect of mixing monetary and
amicable relations, social costs did not—could not—put a stop to borrowing and
lending among friends. In fact, loans not only flowed through structures of
affiliation and affection; they also nourished and reinforced those structures.⁷
Similarly, managing debts, rather than simply avoiding them, was a central
concern of literature on “husbandry,” or household economy. In a well-known
letter of housekeeping advice sometimes cited as a source for Polonius’s speech,
William Cecil, Lord Burghley, offers his son counsel both on lending wisely (avoid
suretyship, extending direct loans instead) and on borrowing judiciously: “In
borrowinge of money be ever pretious of thy worde, for he that cares to keepe
day of payment is lord Commaunder many tymes in another mans goodes.”⁸
The punctual repayment of debts translates into renewed credit: that is, into the
ability to take on new debts in the future. Tusser gives similar advice to his

⁶ Muldrew, Economy, passim.

⁷ Katharine Eisaman Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), pp. 59–74 and Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in
Sixteenth-Century England (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–14, p. 138. See also Chapter 2, below.
⁸ William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Letter 83, in A Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book: A Facsimile Edition
of Folger MS. V.a. 321, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), pp. 277–86,
pp. 284–5. On the letter’s relation to Polonius’s speech, see Jason Powell, “Fathers, Sons and Surrogates:
Fatherly Advice in Hamlet,” in Medieval into Renaissance: Essays for Helen Cooper, ed. Andrew King
and Matthew Woodcock (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 163–86.
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 3

readers: “who quick be to borrow, & slow be to pay: / their credit is naught, go
they neuer so gay.”⁹ The statesman’s letter and the farmer’s couplet acknowledge
what Polonius’s speech elides: that even the wealthiest households had cash poor
seasons, and that within an economy composed of webs of intertwined borrow-
ers and lenders, husbandry’s “edge” could be as easily sharpened as dulled by
access to “another mans goodes.”
In his directives on debt and credit, then, Polonius gets it wrong. He oversim-
plifies the complexities of everyday economic life and urges an unsustainable
course of action. Yet, I want to suggest, Polonius also gets a great deal right—if
not about borrowing and lending in and of themselves, then about the intricate
social machinery that underpinned these economic activities and made them
possible. Taken as a whole, Polonius’s speech provides a remarkable window
into early modern credit culture, and especially into how people presented
themselves and assessed one another within it. To see this, we have to look beyond
what Shakespeare’s counselor says specifically about borrowing and lending and
attend to the rest of his precepts: precepts about when and how much to speak,
what to wear, how to handle disputes, and generally how to manage an outward-
facing, public persona in the face of constant social scrutiny. These activities are,
in fact, the central concerns of all practical economic advice; that is, of all counsel
delivered from the point of view of worldly experience and directed at the
profitable navigation of worldly life. Period practical literature suggests, over
and over, that the questions at the heart of credit culture are not whether to
borrow or lend, or even how or when to do these things. The questions that come
up over and over again—in texts addressed to merchants, farmers, and lords’ sons;
to country-dwellers and urban people—are how to present oneself in the most
positive, and therefore most profitable, manner and how to assess others’ self-
presentations. Advice for borrowers taught them how to dress, speak, and act in
such a way that “being lent to” remained a real possibility; advice for lenders
reminded them not to take surface appearances at face value.
Early modern English credit relations were both socially embedded and
rhetorically constructed, and they were driven by the interplay of persuasive
speech, conduct, and interpretation. This book examines how period writers
treated this fact—that language and interpretation shaped economic relations on
a fundamental level—and how they explored its implications for the construc-
tion of the self, for social bonds, and for the fabric of society. It unfolds from the
premise that England’s culture of credit was a thoroughly rhetoricized arena,
marked by widespread social indeterminacy brought about by the rhetorical
and interpretive strategies through which credit itself was constructed. Scholars
have debated whether the use of interpersonal credit as England’s dominant

⁹ Tusser, Fiue hundreth points, sig. C3v.

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currency gave rise to widespread interpersonal trust or to a generalized attitude

of suspicion.¹⁰ Writers of practical literature like Burghley and Tusser and
dramatists like Shakespeare point us to a third possibility. As their treatment
of credit suggests—and as this book argues—economically motivated social
indeterminacy gave rise to interpersonal dynamics both more complex and
more volatile than either straightforward trust or blanket suspicion: to rhet-
orical strategies designed to produce trust and to corresponding interpretive
strategies aimed at evaluating the trustworthiness of others. Buying, selling,
borrowing, lending, and negotiating were embedded in relationships and sub-
ject to manipulation by means of artful language, conduct, and interpretation.
As a consequence, social performance—of access to resources, of virtuous
intent, of status, of well-off kindred and allies—became a practical skill; and
reading others for signs of solvency and trustworthiness became an economic
necessity. And this is what Polonius’s speech, taken as a whole, is fundamen-
tally about: crafting the self as a legible text, interpreting the texts presented by
others, and navigating a milieu thoroughly structured by the expectation of
social artifice and interpretation.
I turn once more to Polonius’s speech because this well-known passage elab-
orates the model of credit culture articulated in its less familiar real-world analogs:
a model in which rhetoric and thrift are intertwined, and in which the contin-
gencies of a rhetoricized social sphere produce a repertoire of flexible, shifting
responses. Polonius’s mode of advice-giving is, as I have said, typical of period
economic counsel. It is especially typical of the kind of counsel given to young
men coming of age, embarking on new careers, or entering novel social contexts: to
young men, that is, who need to think hard about cultivating credit. The speech’s
style, as well as its content, is fairly standard. Polonius bombards Laertes with
precepts—nine in total, counting conservatively—and these precepts are almost
all tempered, qualified, revised mid-stream. They run:

Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportion’d thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel,
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

¹⁰ For the view that early modern credit relations required and facilitated trust, see Muldrew,
Economy, pp. 4–6, pp. 123–47; Richard Grassby, Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family, and
Business in the English-Speaking World 1580–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
pp. 300–1; and Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 153–86. For challenges to this view, see David
J. Baker, On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009), pp. 62–92; and Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood
in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 2, pp. 8–9.
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 5

Of each new-hatch’d, unfledg’d courage. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that th’opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
(1.3.59–80)

Perhaps the speech’s most striking feature is the way Polonius consistently
reworks his own counsel. Almost every assertion receives immediate qualification:
be familiar, but not vulgar; love your friends, but don’t have too many (or too
costly ones). The result can sound jumbled or even contradictory to modern ears.
Yet this is what advice, especially about money matters, looked and sounded
like in Shakespeare’s England.¹¹ Beyond the world of the play, Polonian echoes
are everywhere. The zig-zagging style, the habit of qualification, the near-
contradictions as the counselor cycles through conflicting attitudes and behaviors
all appear in myriad texts about cultivating credit. In a letter to a young courtier in
an epistolary manual, Nicholas Breton writes, “Keep your purse warily, and your
credit charily, your reputation valiantly, and your honor carefully: for your
friends, as you finde them, vse them: for your enemies, feare them not, but
looke to them.”¹² In a 1589 handbook for young merchants, The marchants
avizo, John Browne urges: “Be earnest in noting & marking euery thing that you
may, but be your selfe as secret and silent as is possible.”¹³ And novice farmers,
Tusser advises, are “To answer stranger cively, / but shew him not thy secresie”
and “To learne how foe to pacifie, / but trust him not too trustely.”¹⁴ This kind

¹¹ The passage has occasionally been read in light of a particular advice genre, letters from fathers to
sons. See Powell, “Fathers, Sons and Surrogates”; W. Lee Ustick, “Advice to a Son: A Type of
Seventeenth-Century Conduct Book,” Studies in Philology 29, no. 3 (July 1932): pp. 409–41; and
Louis B. Wright, ed., Advice to a Son: Precepts of Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Francis
Osborne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962).
¹² Nicholas Breton, A poste with a madde packet of letters (London, 1602), sig. B1r.
¹³ John Browne, The marchants avizo (London, 1589), sig. B1r.
¹⁴ Tusser, Fiue hundreth points, sig. C1r.
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of advice tends to be aphoristic, sing-song, constructed along contrasting or

otherwise related pairings: every/few, friend/foe, borrower/lender. Deceptively
homespun in style, these precepts in fact address great social complexity. They
posit a sophisticated wider world from which adviser and advisee momentarily
stand apart, speaking and listening “plainly” to one another. This wider world is
one where speech is slant and surfaces deceive, and where one must, as Polonius
elsewhere puts it, “by indirections find directions out” (2.1.66).¹⁵ So, if Polonius’s
advice suggests constant self-policing along faintly contradictory lines—do this,
but sometimes do the opposite; do that, but not too much of it—it is not because
he is a hypocrite or a fool. It is because he is practical. The waffling nature of his
precepts is a function not of his own inconsistency but of the world’s.
The slippery world posited by advice literature is often also a new world:
France, for Polonius; the court, for Breton; Iberian ports for Browne; rural
communities for Tusser; the city for other writers, including Thomas Wright
and Henry Peacham.¹⁶ Despite the differing milieux assumed in each of these
texts, the gist of their counsel remains the same: dissembling one’s own motiv-
ations and desires while discovering others’ are always central goals. In each case,
the specified milieu’s novelty calls for heightened attention to social performance
and hermeneutics, but these are also presumed to be everyday strategies within it.
Its inhabitants have to read others, constantly and vigilantly, for clues as to real
intention behind trustworthy- and friendly-seeming surfaces. At the same time,
they must craft personae for themselves that invite a certain kind of reading.
A newcomer simply has to catch up to what are universal, everyday practices. The
specifics of his strategies—clothing, manners, cultivated friendships—will differ
from the English countryside to the London streets, and from Spain to Paris, as
local custom dictates. But everywhere the basic need to fashion a persuasive,
outward-facing self remains in play.
Breton’s letter, Browne’s manual, Tusser’s verses, and Polonius’s precepts all
address, directly or obliquely, the matter of constructing credit. The topics on
which Polonius focuses are nearly universal in the literature of economic advice:
how much and when to speak; cultivating fruitful but non-exploitative friend-
ships; developing an air of “performed secrecy.”¹⁷ Even his concern over dress is
typical, and this concern is yet another connection to credit culture. Polonius’s
advice—“Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy”—begins like a straightforward

¹⁵ I borrow the term “slant” for artfully oblique language from Emily Dickinson, who writes, “Tell all
the truth but tell it slant— / Success in circuit lies.” Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them, ed.
Cristanne Miller (Harvard: Belknap, 2017), p. 563.
¹⁶ Thomas Wright, The passions of the minde in generall (London, 1604), sigs. A4v–A5r; and Henry
Peacham, The art of living in London (London, 1642).
¹⁷ Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Madison, NJ: Farleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2002), p. 22.
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 7

admonition to thrift: don’t spend more than you have on clothing.¹⁸ The primary
message, however, is about display: Laertes’s habit should be “not express’d in
fancy; rich, not gaudy” (1.3.71). He should dress to invite the assumption, on the
part of the French, that he is of “the best rank and station” (73). This is advice, as
Hamlet himself might put it, on seeming rather than being. Related advice shows
up in Breton’s courtier letter—“goe neat, but not gaie, lest it argue lightnesse”—
and in Browne’s Marchants avizo, which holds that a young trader should neither
gamble nor “go fine and costly in apparell: for all these things are especially noted,
and doe bring any yong beginner to vtter discredit and vndoing.”¹⁹ In all three
cases, the issue of restraint in clothing is a matter of managing an audience’s
perceptions. Polonius puts this in terms of social legibility—“The apparel oft
proclaims the man”—and Breton in terms of evading critique. Browne writes in
openly economic terms: once “noted” by others, conspicuously expensive clothing
leads to the beginner-merchant’s “vtter discredit and vndoing.” The possibility of
losing credit is always on a merchant’s mind, but Polonius and Breton are also
concerned with credit, in a broader sense: as reputation constructed within an
environment where artfully creating a legible self is both necessary and profitable.
In all the contexts these speakers and writers address—France, the court, a foreign
trading post—appearance is of paramount importance because of what it implies
about character, status, and spending abilities and habits.
Approached as an artifact of credit culture, perhaps the strangest thing about
Polonius’s speech is not its unworkable advice on borrowing and lending, but
its final directive: “This above all: to thine own self be true / And it must follow
as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man” (1.3.78–80). The
injunction to be true to “thine own self” at first seems to scan as a crowning
contradiction: How can you be true to yourself when you are orienting all your
behaviors towards an outside gaze? How can you be true to others when your
interactions with them are marked by the expectation of artifice on both sides?
Like the impossibility of “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” the obvious
difficulty of “To thine own self be true” reflects a problem at the heart of
England’s culture of credit, one that advice literature and plays revisit again and
again: how to balance the protean performances more or less demanded by a
credit-driven marketplace while maintaining a consistent set of values and a stable
sense of self. The general knowledge that advice literature offers is that the world is
structured by contingency. The skill or “know-how” that it teaches involves
responding to that contingency by being oneself contingent: flexible, responsive

¹⁸ See also the manuscript verses by Yorkshire landowner John Kaye: “A gentleman can not goo
gaye / And manteyne costly fare / Except he knowe the shifte & way / Both how to spend and spare.”
Folger MS X.d.446.
¹⁹ Breton, Poste (1602), sig. B1r and Browne, Marchants, sig. B2r. On clothing’s economic function
see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 17–33.
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to changing conditions and shifting contexts, capable of profitable improvisations

as well as longer-term self-fashioning. Some period thinkers, as we will see,
understood the rhetoricized economic sphere to foster inwardly rooted as well
as outward-facing alterity, arguing that the constant production of a creditworthy
surface led to an estrangement from the self as well as an unethical orientation
toward others. From this point of view, self-protective social improvisations slide
into profitable deceptions; practical performances beget subtle “practice,” in the
period sense of the word as scheming trickery. Polonius’s final injunction to
Laertes offers an alternative to this view, asserting the possibility of a core of
self-sameness, untouched by the perpetually shifting exterior world and uncor-
rupted by the unceasing demands of social performance.²⁰
Taking as its starting point the social and rhetorical structures to which
Polonius points, and that real-world advice-givers even more fully describe, this
book reconceptualizes early modern credit in terms of fiction. I use the word
fiction here in several senses: primarily in the very broad sense of that which is
crafted, fashioned, or made; but also in the senses of (literary) invention and of
legal, political, or social conventions “known to be at variance with fact” but
“accepted . . . for practical convenience.”²¹ Credit culture generated endless fic-
tions, large and small. In a way, credit culture itself was a fiction: a sphere shot
through with countless local acts of “making” and a set of social relations widely
known to be in some sense “unreal,” yet accepted (more or less, most of the time,
day-to-day) because it had to be. Within credit culture, would-be borrowers
worked to imply that they were solvent and trustworthy, while would-be lenders
scrutinized what they saw and heard. Since most people both used credit and
extended it, the dual strategies of implication and inference, of producing and
reading evidence, were everywhere. As a result, credit culture was a profoundly
indeterminate sphere, within which, to borrow from Frank Whigham,
“transparency—the obvious—is revealed as one more fiction, requiring analysis

²⁰ In Hamlet, the movement of the tragic plot actively works against this possibility. Especially for
the play’s titular prince, but really for everyone caught up in palace intrigue, including Polonius,
habitual strategic seeming proves profoundly disruptive both to stable selfhood and to bonds with
others. But in the speech’s real-world advice literature analogs, potential contradictions between artifice
and stability, and between scrutiny and sociability, generally receive brief treatment if any. Such
contradictions inhere in worldly life, but to dwell on them is to reach a tragic—and impractical—
impasse. See Lionel Trilling’s discussion of Polonius’s final injunction in Sincerity and Authenticity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 3–6. For a slightly later period articulation of a
similar sentiment, see Francis Bacon’s “Of Wisedome for a Mans selfe,” in which he writes, “Be so true
to thy Selfe, as thou be not false to Others.” The essayes or counsels, civill and morall (London, 1625),
p. 135. As Bacon’s nineteenth-century editor E.A. Abbott notes, he echoes Polonius in voicing the
opinion that “truth to [oneself] is incompatible with falsehood to others”; Bacon’s Essays, vol. 2, 8th ed.
(London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1889), p. 183. Bacon, however, places the emphasis differently.
Where Polonius suggests that truth to others necessarily proceeds from truth to self, Bacon sees no such
causal link. Moreover, he advocates truth to others first, merely advising his reader to be “so true” (as
true, true to the same degree) to himself as he is “not false to Others.” He writes, “It is a poore Center of
a Mans Actions, Himself” (p. 135).
²¹ OED Online, “fiction, n.,” definition 5.
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and situation before it can be accepted.”²² In this context, even Polonius’s aphor-
istic plainness may be seen as a persuasive tactic, one that conspicuously conceals
its own efforts at persuasion: a gesture of participation in credit culture’s slippery
rhetoricity, and a small-scale act of fiction-making.
The fictional aspects of early modern credit relations—their madeness, their
unreality—have been overlooked by early modern literary scholars and histor-
ians.²³ In the past decade or so, within literary studies, debate has gathered around
Muldrew’s claim that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English society
“came to be defined . . . as the cumulative unity of the millions of interpersonal
obligations which were continually being exchanged and renegotiated.”²⁴ Literary
scholars have tended to either agree or disagree with the essential optimism of this
statement. They have characterized it is as either a fair or an overly positive
characterization of credit’s effect on society, without probing the implications of
the “cumulative unity” for which Muldrew argues: the daily strategies that gave
rise to it, the experiences of the people using those strategies, and what the
aggregate (“unity” or no) might have looked and felt like to those people.²⁵ In
stage plays and in the literature of advice, England’s culture of credit is sometimes
presented as unified, sometimes as fragmented, but in either case as fictive: both
made (or made up) and always at least slightly unreal. In these works, credit

²² Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 36.
²³ By contrast, scholars of the eighteenth century frequently analyze the relationship between fiction
and credit’s instruments and institutions. See for example Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of
Fictionality,” in History, Geography, and Culture, vol. 1, The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 336–63; and Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy:
Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008). Gallagher argues that novels (defined as “believable stories that do not elicit belief,”
p. 340) bear a specific type of fictionality that goes along with the economic structures of modernity: the
same “imaginative play” (p. 346) and “suspension of literal truth” (p. 347) that readers brought to
novels structured those readers’ encounters with banks, banknotes, and commercial enterprise in
general. Similarly, Poovey argues that rise of the banknote parallels the rise of the novel, each form
usefully “mediating” users’ experiences with the other. My own sense is that the interplay of belief and
disbelief, which Gallagher calls “a disposition of ironic credulity” (p. 346), was already a feature of
English economic life before the rise of the banknote or the bank—but that this attitude was then
embedded in communities and relationships, extending towards persons and reputations as well as (or
more than) institutions and instruments. It should be noted that, in early modern studies, works of
economic criticism with methods and aims related to those of Poovey and Gallagher—unearthing the
shared mechanisms of and hermeneutic strategies required by economic and literary forms—in fact
abound, though these have for one reason or another tended not to focus on credit and its fictionality.
See for example J.C. Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought,
1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in
the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Natasha Korda, Labors Lost:
Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2011); Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Linda Woodbridge, English Revenge
Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
²⁴ Muldrew, Economy, p. 123.
²⁵ For these opposing views, see Richard Strier, Unrepentant, p. 157, note 13, and Bailey, Of Bondage,
pp. 8–9.
Another random document with
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in her case meant more than mere liking, and not "really to
like" meant profound indifference.

Springing over her fourth stile, on the way homeward, she

was arrested by an exclamation:

"Jean! That's jolly!"

"Cyril! You here!"

"I'm come to meet you—by accident."

"How did you know where I was?"

"Intuition."

"Nonsense."

"Madame Collier told me you'd gone to Dutton, so of course

I knew you'd come this way. I say!—Give me that basket."

"No. Cyril, let it alone. I like to carry something."

"So do I!"—dexterously twisting the handle off her arm.

"How you bother!"

"Yes, I know. It's only for your good. What's inside the
basket?"

"Nothing that concerns you."

"Hanks of darning cotton, I do believe. I say, Jean, you

must use an uncommon lot of old socks at the Rectory.
Madame Collier's one earthly occupation is turning them
over. I never find her at anything else; unless it is grubbing
up stones in the garden."
"Stockings, you mean; not socks."

"Two varieties of the same genus. What are you hurrying

for, now?"

"Aunt Marie will want me."

"Let her! I want you more."

"I can't wait, really. She will be vexed."

"Have you got to darn? I'll come and read to you, then."

Cyril had scarcely yet overtaken Jean in height. While

actually almost a year her senior, he was commonly
supposed to be the younger of the two. His make was so
slight as to give an appearance of fragility, not inconsistent
with a certain wiry vigour, but heightened by the girlish
hands and pale complexion, not to speak of a face hatchet-
like in thinness. Breadth of brow gave force to the latter,
but the dark hair clustered still in thick waves; and the
long-lashed violet eyes, though redeemed from insipidity by
any amount of fun, lent him so soft and "pretty" an
expression, that it was no wonder he had earned at school
the nickname of "Missy."

This did not imply contempt or unpopularity. More than five

years back, on first leaving Ripley Brow, with its enervating
influences and unlimited petting, for the rougher world of
school, Cyril had suffered much, and had had a hard battle
to fight. Miss Devereux little guessed how much of real
distress had been entailed upon the timid child by her
previous policy, or how he might justly have blamed her for
long months of misery. Happily, the check of a more
invigorating atmosphere came in time to prevent life-long
enfeeblement.
He had struggled through the worst long ago. He had now
been for years a boy among boys; to all appearance as
spirited and careless as any of them, when at school. If to
some extent he suffered still from want of nerve, the fact
was usually veiled. But it was odd how, immediately he
came home for the holidays, he would relapse more or less
into his old ways, responding to Sybella's petting. As of
yore, his affectionate and clinging disposition, together with
an easy sweetness of temper, made him malleable; and also
as of yore, the chief bracing element in his Dulveriford life
was—Jean.

Jean had not yet lost the impulse to take care of him, to
lead, and to expect that he should follow. Growth thus far
had been faster with her than with him. There was marked
promise of intellectual power in Cyril, but in almost all
respects he was still behind his age. Jean remained the
stronger, the swifter, the more fearless, the keener in
perception, the quicker in understanding, actually the elder,
so far.

It was a singular friendship between the two. Each cared

greatly for the other, but not after the same mode. While
Cyril's happiness was bound up in Jean, Jean's happiness
was bound up in Oswald. Cyril cared for no human being as
he cared for Jean. Love for her had grown with his growth,
winding itself in and out with the very strands of his being.
Jean was fond of Cyril, and she missed his companionship
when he was away, but she gave him no passionate
affection. That was reserved for Oswald.

"Why are you not at Dutton Park this afternoon?" asked

Jean.

"Because I'm here."

"Mrs. Villiers must want you."

"Mrs. Villiers isn't Jean, and I'm not Oswald. Why don't you
call her 'Evelyn'?"

"I don't know. When did you go last?"

"When? Oh, to-day's Friday. Monday evening I was there—

and Wednesday. Tuesday she came to us. Often enough,
surely. She's got a lot to do, settling in. I'll go again soon, of
course; perhaps to-morrow morning."

"It ought to be to-day."

"I'll see. What a lot you do think of Evelyn, to be sure!"

"Anyone would! If I had such a sister—"

"Well! If you had?"

"I would—Cyril, what's that?"

"Where? What are you looking at?"

"There! Don't you see?"

They had reached the next stile, and Jean stood not far
from it, gazing across a wide muddy ditch upon the bank
below the hedge.

"A bird—look! It's a robin. I can see its red breast. It has
been hurt."

"It's not a nestling. Too big."

"Then some horrid boy has thrown a stone. Hark! You can
hear it 'peep.' Poor little thing! It is almost too weak to
move. I must get it."
"You can't; just look at that slush."

"Slush! I'm not afraid of wet feet."

The touch of scorn was enough. Before Jean could move,

Cyril was down, ankle-deep, in the very middle of the wet
slush, which indeed proved to be of the nature of thick
watery mud.

"Cyril! How absurd! I didn't mean you to go. I meant to do

it myself. I should have gone to the stile, and climbed along
the bank."

"You couldn't. It's all brambles."

Jean nearly said, "I don't mind scratches," but forbore. Had
she uttered the words, he would certainly have charged the
brambles, to gain scars honourable in her eyes.

"I'll come too." Jean loved a scramble.

"No, don't. Stop! It's no use. Such a mess! Wait a moment.

Here he is—poor little chap! There, don't peck! What do you
mean to do with him? I believe his leg's broken."

"Oh, bring him to me."

"All right, I'm coming."

Jean bent over to receive the fluttering bundle of feathers,

and examined it tenderly, while Cyril sprang up on terra
firma. Furtively, he endeavoured to wipe his boots on the
grass; not openly, for fear Jean should count him
effeminate. He had not yet learned that a love of cleanliness
is not in essence unmasculine.
"Where's the basket? I'll make a soft bed of grass. Yes,
please gather some. You poor little thing! Fancy if we had
not found you! It's certainly a broken leg. We must get
home as fast as possible, and aunt Marie will know what to
do."

"You'll have to tie up the leg in a splint."

"Yes. I'll see. A bit of match, perhaps. Aunt Marie is so

clever at that sort of thing. Cyril, your boots are soaking!
You ought to go straight home and change them."

"Fudge!"

"What would Miss Devereux say?"

"Anything she likes."

"And you may catch cold."

"I'm not going!"

Such an opportunity to assert his manliness was not to be

lost. Jean might think it her duty to uphold Miss Devereux,
but he knew that if he went, she would—well, perhaps not
despise, but undoubtedly she would pity him. To be pitied
by Jean was more than Cyril could stand.

"If you catch cold—"

"I shan't catch cold."

"Well, I have warned you."

"All right."

In two minutes Jean forgot all about his boots, in attention

to her feathered invalid. Cyril by no means forgot, for their
soaked condition and outward muddiness both meant
discomfort, but he never thought of giving way.

As they reached the Rectory door, Mr. Trevelyan came out.

"Jean, just back? What are you after?" This question did not
mean displeasure. It only meant that he always expected
everybody to be "after" some definite object, and that he
wished to hear specified the precise end and aim of Jean's
existence at that moment.

"I'm going in to see if aunt Marie wants me. And this bird—"

"A robin—broken leg," said Mr. Trevelyan, touching the little

creature with kind fingers. "No, your aunt doesn't want you.
Give over the bird to her, and come with me to Dutton
Park."

"Now?"

"I met the General, and he mentioned that Mrs. Villiers

particularly asks an early call."

"Wouldn't aunt Marie like to go?"

"No, she prefers that I should take you."

Jean's eyes shone: her usual sign of pleasure. She never

thought of telling her father that she had already walked to
Dutton and back. The fact would have made no difference,
if he counted it her duty to go now.

"I've not seen Evelyn for a day or two," remarked Cyril, the
wistful look which always strengthened his likeness to
Evelyn creeping into his eyes.
Its effect upon Mr. Trevelyan was to bring the question,
"Would you like to go with us?"

Cyril's answer, if short, was unequivocal. He had not entirely

lost a certain boyish fear of Mr. Trevelyan, but Jean was a
more than counterbalancing attraction.

They went by the road this time—a somewhat shorter route

than by the fields. Mr. Trevelyan walked fast and steadily,
with long swinging strides, and the other two kept pace with
him as best they might: Jean easily, from long practice;
Cyril less easily, though he would on no account have
admitted the fact. He was better at fast running than at fast
walking; and the weight of his soaked boots pulled him
back.

Outside Dutton they saw the "Brow" carriage approaching,

Sybella seated therein with state and dignity.

"I say!" muttered Cyril in foreboding accents.

The carriage drew up, and Sybella bent forward to shake

hands with Mr. Trevelyan, whom she did not exactly
recognise as her Pastor, although she lived in his Parish,
since their views differed on certain points. A puckered
forehead showed discontent. She was never pleased to see
Cyril with the Trevelyans; and, considering how Cyril
haunted Jean, it was remarkable that her eyes should be so
seldom vexed with the vision. Perhaps an explanation lay in
the fact that Miss Devereux loved high roads and shops,
while Jean detested both; wherefore their orbits were
seldom entangled.

"How do you do? A very fine day. I hope Madame Collier is

well. Really I must call upon her one day soon—but so
many engagements, you know—always something turning
up. Cyril, my dear boy, I could not imagine where you were.
I was so anxious to take you to the Park. I have had really
quite to apologise. Two whole days since you went; and you
know it must seem strange. Where can you have been?"

"I am going to Evelyn now."

"But I could have saved you the long walk. Such a hot day!
I am not sure whether I had not better turn back—" Sybella
hesitated, debating with herself whether, in that case, it
would not be needful to give the Trevelyans a lift also.

She could hardly pick up her nephew, and leave them

trudging in the dust. But Mr. Trevelyan was not approved of
by some of her friends, and to be seen by certain of them
driving through Dutton side by side with him—by old Lady
Lucas, for example, or by Colonel Atherstone—such a
juxtaposition of representative individuals was not to be
thought of!

"I am afraid, though, that I cannot well spare the time. My

dear boy, you had really better put off till another day, and
come back with me. I am sure you are fatigued. This hot
sun is enough to give anybody a headache. Quite too much
for him," she added reproachfully to the Rector.

"Is it hot?" asked Mr. Trevelyan. He looked down and up,

and around, as if studying Nature for a reply.

"Exceedingly hot! Most oppressive! Surely you—But people

are so differently constituted," sighed Sybella, with an
audible little puff of exhaustion. "Now I feel to-day quite
incapable—really quite feeble and spiritless. I assure you, I
could not walk a mile to save my life."

"That might prove a potent incentive," suggested Mr.

Trevelyan, with another look at the tree-tops.
His irony was lost upon Sybella.

"Robust people do not suffer in the same way, I believe. So

fortunate for them! But dear Cyril is always so very easily
knocked up—and his poor head, you know—"

Cyril grew furiously red at having to endure this, with Jean

standing by.

"My dear boy, you are quite flushed, you are indeed—quite
overheated. It makes me so anxious. I really cannot
possibly allow this sort of thing to go on. I am sure you
have a headache."

"No, aunt!" Cyril's voice was seldom so gruff.

"No? But you are tired—fatigued. I am certain you will be

overdone. If I—Cyril!!"

Mr. Trevelyan lifted his eyebrows, and Jean's lips twitched.

Miss Devereux pointed with an agonised forefinger at Cyril's
feet.

"Oh, I just got a little muddy. I'm all right."

"It's my fault," Jean said promptly.

"Boys don't mind a trifle of mud," quoth Mr. Trevelyan, with

a solemn smile, perhaps not realising the extent to which
the "trifle of mud" went.

"Mud! His boots are wet through and through! I can see it
for myself. Boys in general are different. Cyril is not like
other boys. He must take care. It is absolutely necessary.
To go about with wet feet—I shall have him laid up all the
holidays. Another attack on his chest like the last would—I
assure you, the Brighton doctor told me, he could not
answer for the consequences," gasped the agitated lady.
"My dear boy, get at once into the carriage. I must drive
you home as fast as possible. As fast as possible,
Grimshaw!" raising her voice.

And Grimshaw touched his hat.

"You must change your boots and stockings the very

moment we arrive, and I must give you something hot to
drink."

Had the Trevelyans not been there, Cyril would no doubt

have yielded without resistance. He might have felt a
certain boyish dislike to the fuss—a dislike which had for
some time been growing upon him; yet mere force of habit
would have won the day. To be petted and coddled by his
aunt was so much a matter of course, that hitherto he had
submitted.

Jean's presence made all the difference. Cyril was fond of

his aunt, and he liked to please her; indeed, he liked to
please everybody, whether or no fondness came into the
question. But his love for Jean, his desire to stand well in
Jean's eyes, his dread of being pitied by Jean, were
overwhelming motives. To step into the carriage, and be
driven home for the purpose of changing his boots, while
Jean stood looking on, was too much. For almost the first
time, Sybella's petted darling refused to answer to the pull
of her rein.

"Nonsense, aunt. I'm all right. I'm going on to see Evelyn."

"If I may advise, I should not recommend a drive with

damp boots," said Mr. Trevelyan. "Exercise is safer than
sitting still; and he can dry them, if needful, at the Park."
This was reasonable. But to expect Sybella to hear reason
from Mr. Trevelyan would mean a dire ignorance of human
nature.

"I beg your pardon. I think I am the best judge as to that,"

she said, reddening. "Cyril, my dear boy—No, I could not
possibly run the risk!" to Mr. Trevelyan. "Cyril, my dear boy,
you really must—Cyril, I insist! You must come home with
me at once. Evelyn will understand. I will explain to her. I
could not allow you to go on with your feet in such a
condition. My dear boy, it is only for your own good—Pray
make haste, and get in! Every moment's delay increases
the risk. My dear boy, I assure you—Really, Cyril, I am very
much surprised—this is not like you! I am afraid it is the
consequence of—Cyril, if you do not come at once, I shall
have—Not of course that I expect you to prefer to be with
me, rather than with—It is only for your own sake! Cyril,
this is really too much! I insist upon obedience!"

Cyril held resolutely back, thus far.

Mr. Trevelyan moved a step nearer.

"My boy, the more manly part will be to yield," he said very
low; not too low for Jean as well as Cyril to hear.

The lad grow white, and looked at Jean.

"Yes, do go!" she said gently, pityingly.

Cyril could better have done without the pity: but Mr.
Trevelyan's words took effect.

"I must beg of you, Cyril, not to delay. For your own sake as
well as mine. I cannot wait any longer, and I insist upon
your coming," Miss Devereux went on with querulous
repetition.
"Good-bye," said Mr. Trevelyan.

He took Cyril's hand, with a warm grasp which spoke

volumes: and from that hour, he had a hold upon the young
baronet. "Come and see us again soon."

Cyril crimsoned to the roots of his hair, and stepped in.

"Poor boy: it is hard upon him," muttered the clergyman, as

they drove off, Sybella talking still.

CHAPTER III.

HUSBAND AND WIFE.

"Thus each retains his notions, every one."

JANE TAYLOR.

DUTTON PARK stood on sufficiently high ground to

command a view of the town, and of the surrounding
country. In one direction Ripley Brow might be seen, the
Brow standing up boldly, more than two miles away.
Between, the river wound in curves among low green banks
and meadows, after its rush through the gorge.
On a fine day, such as this, anyone walking in the Park
grounds could see the "S-like" windings shine here and
there with the brightness of burnished metal in the
sunshine; grey spaces of water intervening.

There were two ways of reaching the house from the main
road. One was by a shady drive, well bowered, the trees
meeting overhead in a continuous arch. The other lay
through open park-like fields, ending in two large ponds,
one on either side of the garden entrance. Following the
latter road, Mr. Trevelyan and Jean lingered three or four
minutes to watch the swans; then they crossed the wide
lawn of the garden, which was sprinkled with pines and
yews. Beds of massed colouring, closely packed, showed
rich and artistic arrangements of tints. The house was
extensive, white and low, guiltless of creepers, and on one
side, sheltered by a group of mighty elms.

The great drawing-room, over forty-five feet long, was used

only on state occasions. Evelyn's favourite resort for
ordinary purposes was the library, a long four-windowed
room, well lined with books. General Villiers had his private
study besides, and Evelyn had her boudoir; but when at
home, she was usually to be found in the library.

On this particular afternoon, she stood in the end window, a

large bow, gazing somewhat pensively upon the outer view:
not as if she very much cared for it.

At twenty-five, Evelyn well fulfilled the promise of her

girlhood, so far as actual beauty was concerned. The
delicacy of form and feature, the perfection of colouring, the
grace of movement, were unchanged. They had only
ripened into a fuller loveliness, with the addition of a
finished repose and graciousness of manner, an exquisite
high-bred ease, which no mere girl can show.
She wore a cream-coloured dress of India muslin,
handsome in make and rich in embroidery. There was about
her every appearance of a life of ease, of luxury, of
affectionate care, every token of a sheltered existence.
Looking upon her from without, it might seem that she had
not a want ungratified.

Yet those who studied Evelyn Villiers with observant eyes

were conscious of something lacking. They knew that life to
this fair creature had not thus far been all that it might have
been. The delicate cheek had already a slight inward curve,
marring its perfect oval; a curve which in such a face could
only have come from illness or from wear and tear. The
graceful bearing had about it a touch of weariness, of
listless indifference, like one tired of her surroundings. The
closed lips had gained a faintly satirical set; and the violet
eyes contained a look of forlornness, as if she thirsted
perpetually after something unattainable. It had been said
that the expression of those eyes was as of a captive
creature, chained down, and hopeless of escape.

But these were the views of those only who could see a
little below the surface. People in general said how pretty
and sweet and charming she was—only rather too exclusive,
rather difficult to know! And what an enviable life she led!
To be sure, one might wish that the husband were a few
years younger: but then he was rich and gentlemanly,
delightful in his manners, and such a good man too! What
mattered a little discrepancy in age? Mrs. Villiers was a
happy woman: she had everything she could possibly
desire!

"Mr. Trevelyan! How good of him! And Jean!"

Evelyn did not stir till the callers were announced. Then she
went forward, in her soft restrained fashion, holding out two
hands, a rare gesture with Mrs. Villiers.

"I am so glad to see you both. This is kind. It is just what I

wanted, treating me like an old friend! Somehow I have
always had the feeling that my most real friends were at
Dulveriford Rectory; though I have seen so little of you
since my marriage. I hope to see more now. We have come
back to settle down for a time. My husband is tired of
travelling."

"General Villiers was so good as to say that we might call at

once, not waiting till after Sunday."

"Did he? That was kind. He knew I wished it. And this is
Jean! The old look, I see—hardly changed."

She kissed Jean's cheek in her winning way—for Evelyn

could be irresistibly winning when she chose, though she
did not always choose.

"Do I know you well enough?" she asked.

"Jean is a child still," promptly asserted Mr. Trevelyan, while

Jean breathed a "Yes" of unlimited meaning.

Evelyn smiled. She knew in a moment her power over the

girl, and she was glad to know it. Jean interested her: not
only for the sake of Mr. Trevelyan, whom Evelyn had always
liked. Jean herself was so uncommon: not exactly good-
looking, but so very uncommon. There was a trenchant
attractiveness about the aristocratic pose of Jean's head,
and the straightforward earnestness of her singular eyes,
combined with an abnormal simplicity of dress and manner.

Evelyn's glance travelled over her, taking in all particulars:

then she sat down on a sofa, making Jean do the same.
"I want to know this child well," she said, with her sweet
graciousness. "Yes, I suppose she is a child still—compared
with me. But I have a fancy that we shall be friends some
day. Will you come and see me, Jean, when I am alone,
now and then?"

Jean's eyes brightened into a golden glow like sunshine. "If

I may," she said.

"The oftener the better," quoth Mr. Trevelyan, who was

under the power of Evelyn's magic wand, though not to
such an extent as to lose his own individuality.

"Thanks! Then come often, Jean—as often as you can be

spared. I must introduce you to my little boudoir. Only
think, that naughty brother of mine has not been near me
since Wednesday morning."

Explanations had to be given. Jean left them to her father,

and Mr. Trevelyan said no more than was needful, but
Evelyn drew certain particulars from him by skilful
questioning.

"The old story," she said. "My aunt will do her best to spoil
him. After all, the only hope lies in school."

"Cyril doesn't want to be a coddle," spoke up Jean in his

defence.

"You and he are great friends, are you not?"

"I don't know. Yes; I suppose so," Jean answered slowly, as

if anxious to be exact.

Presently, with an abrupt change of subject—only, nothing

that Evelyn did ever had an abrupt effect—Mrs. Villiers
asked—
"What of Dutton parties and politics?"

"I am not a man of Dutton," was the answer.

"The better able, perhaps, to take a dispassionate outside

view."

"That may be," cautiously, "but I am very busy in my own

work. Not much time to watch other people."

"I wish 'other people' could say the same. It seems to me

that the normal occupation of Dutton generally is to sit and
look at its neighbours—not with approving eyes."

"A common result of too little to do."

"And looking at them means talking about them. Things

have always been so, I suppose; but after years away, one
notices more. I have been in the thick of it all this week.
Everybody does not wait, like you and Jean, for leave to call
before Sunday. Perhaps I should not have given leave in
some cases—" with a slight curl of her lip. "I have had any
number of callers: and they all seem convinced that the one
object of my coming home is to hear how badly the world
has gone on in my absence. The Dutton world I mean."

"So long as they keep to generalities—" and a pause.

"They do not. It is all about individuals."

"Such remarks may be checked, if one is resolved."

Evelyn's face wore a curious look, as if she were conscious

of certain elements in the question which he had failed to
grasp.

"Perhaps—" she said gently. And then—

"St. John's is unchanged, I hear. The shabby little boys still
in full force!"

Mr. Trevelyan smiled, and drew cabalistic signs on the

carpet with his walking-stick, while Jean listened and learnt.
"I imagine that a good many elderly people would be
distressed at changes in St. John's," he said.

"People who believe in the infallibility of sixty years ago: I

never do understand that view of matters. Why must all
that is done at a certain date in one's life be right, and
every after deviation be wrong? Shall I come to the same
way of thinking when I am old?"

"It is a not unusual result of age with ordinary minds."

"But may not people go on and learn more, instead of

standing still? And don't the needs of different generations
differ? Doesn't human nature take fresh developments from
time to time, wanting varieties of help? I don't often talk
like this—" and a restless caged look came into her beautiful
eyes. "People would not understand. But surely truth as a
whole is wider than it is made out by some such good
people."

"Truth as a whole is wide as Him who is the Truth: and He is

wider than the Universe which He has made. Our views of
Truth may be narrow, but Truth itself is never narrow." Mr.
Trevelyan spoke in a brief incisive style, and she smiled.

"Yes: that is what I meant. You understand. One gets a

glimpse of how things really are sometimes—and then to
come down to the little circles of good people, saying hard
things of each other—But I shall be as bad as they, if I go
on! We had better talk of something else. Tell me about
your sister. Is she well? Busy as ever, I suppose. I want to
see her the first day I can. Ah—here is my husband."
A nameless change crept over Evelyn, noted at once by the
observant Jean. She looked up with a kind expression, a
species of polite wifely welcome; but the smile vanished,
and with it, her engaging sweetness. In a moment, the
violet eyes grew weary, the lips satirical, the whole manner
dignified and listless.

General Villiers came in quickly, with his military step and

carriage; handsome still, though his grey hair had become
white, and he was older in appearance by many years than
the number of his summers warranted. Chronic ill-health is
apt to age a man: and he had suffered much at times from
rheumatism. He might have been easily taken for past
seventy: and it was quite true, as Mrs. Kennedy had said,
that he looked like Evelyn's grandfather. He had even begun
to stoop a little. At the moment of his entrance, a distinct
frown was stamped upon his brow, as if something had
vexed him: but it cleared away at the sight of callers, and
he came forward to greet them, with his air of polished
courtesy.

The Trevelyans did not belong to that "St. John set" which
formed his own chosen environment when at home. As he
would perhaps have said, they did not "suit him." He knew,
however, that Evelyn liked them: and he was too
affectionate a husband not to be pleased with what gave
her pleasure, even though he might be just a little uneasy
at the prospect of an intimacy in that quarter.

He was somewhat in bondage to the opinions of others; not

of "others" generally, but of certain leading individuals in his
own clique; Miss Devereux, for instance, and Lady Lucas,
and Colonel Atherstone, none of whom liked or approved of
Mr. Trevelyan. Where his own kindliness of heart would have
carried him on, he was often pulled back by a recollection of
what others—these particular "others—" might say. Still, he