Explore "The Guilty River" by Wilkie Collins on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Giles Toller's miserly nature had offered to his lodger shelter from wind and rain, and the furniture absolutely necessary to make a bedroom habitable -- and nothing more. There was no carpet on the floor, no paper on the walls, no ceiling to hide the rafters of the roof. The chair that I sat on was the one chair in the room; the man whose guest I had rashly consented to be found a seat on his bed. Upon his table I saw pens and pencils, paper and ink, and a battered brass candlestick with a common tallow candle in it. His changes of clothing were flung on the bed; his money was left on the unpainted wooden chimney-piece; his wretched little morsel of looking-glass (propped up near the money) had been turned with its face to the wall. He perceived that the odd position of this last object had attracted my notice.
"Vanity and I have parted company," he explained; "I shrink from myself when I look at myself now. The ugliest man living -- if he has got his hearing -- is a more agreeable man in society than I am. Does this wretched place disgust you?"