One of Our Conquerors

A financier of enormous credit slips on a piece of orange peel on London Bridge, and the fall — social, marital, mental — takes the rest of the book. The marriage at the centre of his fortune was never legal, and everyone he entertains knows it. Meredith wrote for years as a publisher's reader, keeping other men's novels out, and his own late style here is so compressed that Stevenson called reading him a physical exercise.