“Life’s a funny business; you look after your business and that will look after you.”
“But what in the world are we in the world at all for, Simpkins? Isn’t it surely to do just the things we most intensely want to do? And you do boots and boots and boots. Don’t you ever get out and about?—theatres—girls—sport—or do you insist on boot, the whole boot, and nothing but boot?”
“No, none of them,” replied Simpkins. “Don’t care for theatres, I’ve never been. Don’t care for girls, I like a quiet life. I keep myself to myself—it’s safer, don’t get out of your depth then. I do go and have a look at the football match sometimes, but it’s only because we make the boots for some of your crack players, and you want to know what you are making them for. Work doesn’t trouble me, nothing troubles me, and I got money in the bank.”
“Damme, Simpkins, you have a terrible conviction about you; if I listen to you much longer I shall bind myself apprentice to you. I feel sure that you make nice, soft, watertight, everlasting boots, and then we should rise in the profession together. Discourse, Simpkins; you enchant mine ears—both of them.”
“What I say is,” concluded Simpkins, “you can’t understand everything. I shouldn’t want to; I’m all right as it is.”
“Of course you are, you’re simply too true. This is a place flowing with afternoon tea, tutors, and clap-trap. It’s a city in which everything is set upon a bill. You’re simply too true, if we are not out of our depth we are in up to our ears—I am. It’s most fascinating.”
Soon afterwards Simpkins left him. Descending the stairs to the rooms of Evans-Antrobus he switched on the light. It was very quiet and snug in those rooms, with the soft elegant couch, the reading-lamp with the delicious violet shade, the decanter with whiskey, the box of chocolate biscuits, and the gramophone. He sat down by the fire, waiting and waiting. Simpkins waited so long that he got used to the room, he even stole a sip of whiskey and some of the chocolate biscuits. Then to show his independence, his contempt for Mr. Evans-Antrobus and his trickery, he took still more of the whiskey—a drink he had never tasted before—he really took quite a lot. He heaped coal upon the fire, and stalked about the room with his hands in his pockets or examined the books, most of which were about something called Jurisprudence, and suchlike. Simpkins liked books; he began reading:
That the Pleuronectidæ are admirably adapted by their flattened and asymmetrical structure for their habits of life, is manifest from several species, such as soles and flounders, etc., being extremely common.
He did not care much for science; he opened another:
It is difficult indeed to imagine that anything can oscillate so rapidly as to strike the retina of the eye 831,479,000,000,000 in one second, as must be the case with violet light according to this hypothesis.