While Lavinia's in the house I'll go bail I'll make her work.
If she goes away I've got to pay someone in her place, haven't I?
Twenty guineas is the very lowest I'll take, and if you was anything like the gentleman you look you'd make it double." The haggling over such a matter and the coarse mercenary nature of the woman jarred upon the poet's sensitive soul.

The plain fact that he hadn't got twenty guineas in the world could not be gainsaid.

But he had rich friends.

If he could only interest them in this protegee of his something might be done.

And there were the "Fables." "Twenty guineas," he repeated.