The destructive wave of emotion had
risen in me, rolled through me and gone by. The struggle was over,
and I lived again but to work. I stood on the rug rolling a
cigarette, and lighted it leisurely, trying to recall a respectable
calm, and when I had fairly succeeded I went out and downstairs. I
came into the dining-room and found my father still there, looking
through a budget of political pamphlets that had just come in by the
post.
He looked up, and I met his eyes with a laugh.
"I have decided not to look out for a vacancy in the shoeblack
line," I said; "but to go on--up the hill. Is there any claret or
water or soda about--I don't much care what it is?"
"There is claret and soda too--there on the cheffonier. What a pity
it is, Victor, you are so unreasonable! You make yourself look
deplorably ill about every trifle! You are certainly trying to find
a short cut out of the world! Why don't you take things more
easily?"
"I am as I am," I muttered. "I'm going out now," I said, when I had
finished the soda.
"I'm going to look Howard up. I have got a new plan of work if he'll
join me in it. I shall see."
My father elevated his shoulders as much as to say, Some new phase
of dementia, I suppose, and I went out.
I took the underground to Baker Street, and thence two minutes' walk
brought me to the house I wanted.
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