Explore "The Surgeon of Gough Square" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
He was a young man, but appearing careworn and prematurely aged. His face had a spoiled and dingy look such as an actor's bears by daylight, when for the paint and glow and glamour of the boards are substituted the grey and gripping realities of existence. The fruitlessness of all hope, of all cheery effort, seemed typified for him in the stagnant November fog which brooded over the City without. As he gazed through his window into the dreary murk, the dull roar which reached his ears from Fleet Street and its adjacent market sounded to him like the boom of surf to a castaway in a desolate land. He was stranded, he felt, among the waste places of life, and no prospect of release was ever more to be his.
He had started his professional career with high expectations and a confidence born of capital possession. They had all, hopes and confidence and capital, gone to wreck on the shoals of a giant fraud. What solace to him was it that the law had ended by claiming its own? It had been a greater mercy had it remained eternally blind, and left him, one of many victims, to live on content in his fool's paradise. Though his substance had been dissipated, the interest, regularly paid, had served him for his needs. It had been all the sinews he desired in his wrestle with fortune. Was it not in the bitter irony of things that his high rectitude should be expected to rejoice in that vindication of justice which had left him a pauper?