George Gissing

“ Big red chaps, all muscle and beef—easy enough for them to get a living. Ugly devils, too, most of them; whilst he—well, he hadn't quite the looks of a few years ago, but didn't that girl with the blue feather turn to glance at him a second time in Old Street last night?
If only he could find Mrs. Billings again; that was what he wished. The Fulham girl was dead long since, and in the end she had come to treat him meanly. Perhaps she couldn't help it. But he felt sure Mrs. Billings was alive somewhere, and in good circumstances. Ah, she was the only one he ever really cared for. ”

“ He must live, yet no one would supply him with the means to live honestly. He hadn't an hour's work in his slim, starved body. If a girl of the pavement had a friendship for him, and pitied his hard lot, and out of her superfluity enabled him to keep body and soul together, where was the harm of it? ”

“ His eyes watered, his pasty skin was marked with pustules; mere stubble of what once had been a moustache and beard roughened the lower parts of his face. But at this moment, as he shuffled along the gutter, and sang his nasal litany to the flow of Cheapside, memory had revived his youth. It was twenty years' ago; he saw himself a thin, bloodless, yellow-haired lad, with large pale blue eyes and a cast of features peculiarly attractive to the girls of his acquaintance. All the money he could spare went in hair oils and haherdashery. ”