We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people

could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less

miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition.

There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying

ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my

belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.

Every morning, with an air ever new, Herbert went into the City to look

about him. I often paid him a visit in the dark back-room in which

he consorted with an ink-jar, a hat-peg, a coal-box, a string-box, an

almanac, a desk and stool, and a ruler; and I do not remember that I

ever saw him do anything else but look about him. If we all did what

we undertake to do, as faithfully as Herbert did, we might live in a

Republic of the Virtues. He had nothing else to do, poor fellow, except

at a certain hour of every afternoon to "go to Lloyd's"--in observance

of a ceremony of seeing his principal, I think. He never did anything

else in connection with Lloyd's that I could find out, except come back

again. When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he positively

must find an opening, he would go on 'Change at a busy time, and walk in

and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance figure, among the assembled

magnates. "For," says Herbert to me, coming home to dinner on one

of those special occasions, "I find the truth to be, Handel, that an

opening won't come to one, but one must go to it,--so I have been."

If we had been less attached to one another, I think we must have hated

one another regularly every morning. I detested the chambers beyond

expression at that period of repentance, and could not endure the

sight of the Avenger's livery; which had a more expensive and a

less remunerative appearance then than at any other time in the

four-and-twenty hours. As we got more and more into debt, breakfast

became a hollower and hollower form, and, being on one occasion at

breakfast-time threatened (by letter) with legal proceedings, "not

unwholly unconnected," as my local paper might put it, "with jewelery,"

I went so far as to seize the Avenger by his blue collar and shake

him off his feet,--so that he was actually in the air, like a booted

Cupid,--for presuming to suppose that we wanted a roll.




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