Mr.Sheldon had no leisure for collecting; and Georgy preferred the gaudy pink-and-blue vases of a Regent-street china-shop to all the dingy _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of a Wedgwood, or the quaint shepherds and shepherdesses of Chelsea.

As for books, were there not four or five resplendent volumes primly disposed on one of the tables; an illustrated edition of Cowper's lively and thrilling poems; a volume of Rambles in Scotland, with copper-plate engravings of "Melrose by night," and Glasgow Cathedral, and Ben Nevis, and other scenic and architectural glories of North Britain; a couple of volumes of _Punch_, and an illustrated "Vicar of Wakefield;" and what more could elevated taste demand in the way of literature?
Nobody ever read the books; but Mrs.Sheldon's visitors were sometimes glad to take refuge in the Scottish scenery and the pictorial Vicar during that interval of dulness and indigestion which succeeds a middle-class dinner.

Georgy read a great many books; but they were all novels, procured from the Bayswater branch of a fashionable circulating library, and were condemned unread by Mr.Sheldon, who considered all works of fiction perfectly equal in demerit, and stigmatised them, in a general way, as "senseless trash." He had tried to read novels in the dreary days of his Bloomsbury probation; but he had found that the heroes of them were impracticable beings, who were always talking of honour and chivalry, and always sacrificing their own interests in an utterly preposterous manner; and he had thrown aside story after story in disgust.
"Give me a book that is something like life, and I'll read it," he exclaimed impatiently; "but I can't swallow the high-flown prosings of impossibly virtuous inanities." One day, indeed, he had been struck by the power of a book, a book written by a certain Frenchman called Balzac.

He had been riveted by the hideous cynicism, the supreme power of penetration into the vilest corners of wicked hearts; and he flung the book from him at last with an expression of unmitigated admiration.
"That man knows his fellows," he cried, "and is not hypocrite enough to conceal his knowledge, or to trick out his puppets in the tinsel and rags of false sentiment in order that critics and public may cry, 'See, what noble instincts, what generous impulses, what unbounded sympathy for his fellow-creatures this man has!' This Frenchman is an artist, and is not afraid to face the difficulties of his art.

What a scoundrel this Philippe Bridau is! And after wallowing in the gutter, he lives to bespatter his virtuous brother with the mire from his carriage wheels.
That is _real_ life.