The Crimson Cryptogram 12+

📗 "Poverty, naked and unconcealed! One can endure that, with some patience, as a beaten soldier in the battle of life. But genteel pauperism--the semi-poverty of the middle-class, that lives a necessary lie at the cost of incessant worry and constant defeat--there you have the true misery of life. Believe me, Cass, there is no torture like that of an ambition which cannot be attained for lack of money.""I did not know you were ambitious, Ellis.""Not of setting the Thames on fire. My desires are limited to a good practice, a moderate income, a home, and a wife to love me. These wishes are reasonable enough, Heaven knows, yet some cursed Fate prevents their realisation. And I have to sit down and wait; a doctor can do nothing else. I must listen with such philosophy as I have for the ring of the door bell to announce my first patient, and the ring never comes. The heart grows sick, the brain rusty, the money goes, the temper sours, and so I pass the best days of my life."