Neither of the gentlemen said anything for three minutes,
though Jacob shifted perhaps five inches to the left,
and then as many to the right. Then Jacob grunted,
and suddenly crossed the room.
“Will you come and have something to eat?”
he said to Clara Durrant.
“Yes, an ice. Quickly. Now,”
she said.
Downstairs they went.
But half-way down they met Mr. and Mrs. Gresham, Herbert
Turner, Sylvia Rashleigh, and a friend, whom they
had dared to bring, from America, “knowing that
Mrs. Durrant—wishing to show Mr. Pilcher.—Mr.
Pilcher from New York—This is Miss Durrant.”
“Whom I have heard so much of,” said Mr.
Pilcher, bowing low.
So Clara left him.
About half-past nine Jacob left the house, his door
slamming, other doors slamming, buying his paper,
mounting his omnibus, or, weather permitting, walking
his road as other people do. Head bent down, a
desk, a telephone, books bound in green leather, electric
light.... “Fresh coals, sir?” ...
“Your tea, sir."... Talk about football,
the Hotspurs, the Harlequins; six-thirty Star brought
in by the office boy; the rooks of Gray’s Inn
passing overhead; branches in the fog thin and brittle;
and through the roar of traffic now and again a voice
shouting: “Verdict—verdict—winner—winner,”
while letters accumulate in a basket, Jacob signs
them, and each evening finds him, as he takes his
coat down, with some muscle of the brain new stretched.
Then, sometimes a game of chess; or pictures in Bond
Street, or a long way home to take the air with Bonamy
on his arm, meditatively marching, head thrown back,
the world a spectacle, the early moon above the steeples
coming in for praise, the sea-gulls flying high, Nelson
on his column surveying the horizon, and the world
our ship.
Meanwhile, poor Betty Flanders’s letter, having
caught the second post, lay on the hall table—poor
Betty Flanders writing her son’s name, Jacob
Alan Flanders, Esq., as mothers do, and the ink pale,
profuse, suggesting how mothers down at Scarborough
scribble over the fire with their feet on the fender,
when tea’s cleared away, and can never, never
say, whatever it may be—probably this—Don’t
go with bad women, do be a good boy; wear your thick
shirts; and come back, come back, come back to me.
But she said nothing of the kind. “Do you
remember old Miss Wargrave, who used to be so kind
when you had the whooping-cough?” she wrote;
“she’s dead at last, poor thing. They
would like it if you wrote. Ellen came over and
we spent a nice day shopping. Old Mouse gets very
stiff, and we have to walk him up the smallest hill.
Rebecca, at last, after I don’t know how long,
went into Mr. Adamson’s. Three teeth, he
says, must come out. Such mild weather for the
time of year, the little buds actually on the pear
trees. And Mrs. Jarvis tells me—“Mrs.
