When, in May, he came from New York to lay siege to London and to the heart of Helen Carey he had with him, all told, fifteen hundred dollars.

That was all he possessed in the world; and unless the magazines bought his stories there was no prospect of his getting any more.
Friends who knew London told him that, if you knew London well, it was easy to live comfortably there and to go about and even to entertain modestly on three sovereigns a day.

So, at that rate, Philip calculated he could stay three months.

But he found that to know London well enough to be able to live there on three sovereigns a day you had first to spend so many five-pound notes in getting acquainted with London that there were no sovereigns left.

At the end of one month he had just enough money to buy him a second-class passage back to New York, and he was as far from Helen as ever.
Often he had read in stories and novels of men who were too poor to marry.