Well, I wasn't going to abuse him. I was only going to ask: Is there any quality which distinguishes his work from that of twenty struggling writers … - George Gissing

Why, who are the real social reformers? The men who don’t care a scrap for the people, but take up ideas because they can make capital out of them. It isn’t idealists who do the work of the world, but the hard-headed, practical, selfish men. A big employer of labour ‘ll do more good in a day, just because he sees profit’ll come of it, than all the mooning philanthropists in a hundred years.

The thought of Clara became a preoccupation, and with the love which at length he recongised there blended a sense of fate fulfilling itself. His enthusiasms, his purposes, never defined as education would have defined them, were dissipated into utter vagueness. He lost his guiding interests, and found himself returning to those of boyhood. The country once more attracted him; he took out of his old sketch-books, bought a new one, revived the regret that he could not be a painter of landscape. A visit to one or two picture-galleries, and then again profound discouragement, recognition of the fact that he was a mechanic and never could be anything else.
It was the end of his illusions. For him not even passionate love was to preserve the power od idealising its object. He loved Clara with all the desire of his being, but could no longer deceive himself in judging her character. The same sad clearness of vision affected his judgement of the world about him, of the activities in which he had once been zealous, of the conditions which enveloped his life and the lives of those dear to him. The spirit of revolt often enough stirred within him, but no longer found utterance in the speech which brings no relief; he did his best to dispel the mood, mocking at it as folly. Consciously he set himself that task of becoming a practical man, of learning to make the best of life as he found it, of shunning as the fatal error that habit of mind which kept John Hewett on the rack. Who was he that he should look for pleasant things in his course through the world? ‘We are the lower orders; we are the working classes,’ he said bitterly to his friend, and that seemed the final answer to all his aspirations.

Everything he undertook was easy to him, and by a pleasant self-deception he made the passing of a school task his augury of success in greater things.