there his health suffered from the darkness and lack of air and the long
hours.
He came in pale and tired. His mother looked at him. She saw he was
rather pleased, and her anxiety all went.
"Well, and how was it?" she asked.
"Ever so funny, mother," he replied. "You don't have to work a bit hard,
and they're nice with you."
"And did you get on all right?"
"Yes: they only say my writing's bad. But Mr. Pappleworth--he's my
man--said to Mr. Jordan I should be all right. I'm Spiral, mother; you
must come and see. It's ever so nice."
Soon he liked Jordan's. Mr. Pappleworth, who had a certain "saloon bar"
flavour about him, was always natural, and treated him as if he had been
a comrade. Sometimes the "Spiral boss" was irritable, and chewed more
lozenges than ever. Even then, however, he was not offensive, but one
of those people who hurt themselves by their own irritability more than
they hurt other people.
"Haven't you done that YET?" he would cry. "Go on, be a month of
Sundays."
Again, and Paul could understand him least then, he was jocular and in
high spirits.
"I'm going to bring my little Yorkshire terrier bitch tomorrow," he said
jubilantly to Paul.
"What's a Yorkshire terrier?"
"DON'T know what a Yorkshire terrier is? DON'T KNOW A YORKSHIRE--" Mr.
Pappleworth was aghast.
"Is it a little silky one--colours of iron and rusty silver?"
"THAT'S it, my lad. She's a gem. She's had five pounds' worth of pups
already, and she's worth over seven pounds herself; and she doesn't
weigh twenty ounces."
The next day the bitch came. She was a shivering, miserable morsel. Paul
did not care for her; she seemed so like a wet rag that would never
dry. Then a man called for her, and began to make coarse jokes. But Mr.
Pappleworth nodded his head in the direction of the boy, and the talk
went on _sotto voce_.
Mr. Jordan only made one more excursion to watch Paul, and then the only
fault he found was seeing the boy lay his pen on the counter.
"Put your pen in your ear, if you're going to be a clerk. Pen in your
ear!" And one day he said to the lad: "Why don't you hold your shoulders
straighter? Come down here," when he took him into the glass office and
fitted him with special braces for keeping the shoulders square.
But Paul liked the girls best. The men seemed common and rather dull.
He liked them all, but they were uninteresting. Polly, the little brisk
overseer downstairs, finding Paul eating in the cellar, asked him if she
could cook him anything on her little stove. Next day his mother gave
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