Mr. Wick, who had had a serious conflict with his chief a few days before, and come out with streaming colours, was feeling very happy, in spite of the pouring rain and the dreadful uniformity of the wet-November-afternoon faces about him. He was one step farther on towards his goal, which was nothing less than becoming a great newspaper proprietor and running the political world from a swivel chair somewhere in Fleet Street. And it was very sweet to him to be sent in this intimate way by Griselda Walbridge to inspect and report on her mother.
And now, under the shelter of his dripping umbrella, he was finishing a book, which he had read conscientiously, though with incredible swiftness. Since his meeting with Griselda, he had taken the trouble to look through half a dozen of Mrs. Walbridge's books, and could see (for he was unconsciously a very good critic) what the secret of their success was.
"Very slow," he explained to his mother. "Nothing much happens and there are the same people in all of them, with different names. She always has pretty names for the girls, and the men are usually swells. Kind of book a woman could read while she's knitting, or boiling the clothes, or bathing the baby, without either losing the thread of the story or scamping her work."
But this new book, he realised, had lost that easy quality. There were pages of undigested realism scattered through it; several of the stock characters were missing. There was, for instance, no faithful old family butler, no sinuous foreign adventuress. (The innocence of Violet Walbridge's adventuresses was prodigious, in spite of the desperate epithets she showered on them) and there was a superfluous infant, nameless, and as unnecessary to the story as it was to his mother, whose presence was as inappropriate as that of Gaby Deslys at a Quaker meeting.
"That baby puts the lid on," the young man thought, stuffing the book in his mackintosh pocket and feeling in the other pocket for the safety of the treasure he had put there. "She'll bust the whole show if she goes on like that. She can't do the new stuff, and her old patients won't stand such strong doses as this."
As he got off the bus his mind was engaged with wondering whether Mrs. Walbridge had any fortune apart from her pen.
"Strikes me that Paul is something of an objet de luxe," he reflected, as he turned off Albany Street. "Bank clerks oughtn't to go messing about with stockbrokers, and that fellow Brock is a bad egg. When I've married Griselda, pretty pet, we shan't have very much to do with Master Paul. The other one, Guy, the soldier, looks a decent lad. I like that photograph."
As he reached the house his pace slackened and over his shrewd journalistic face came an odd softening as if for a moment his very thoughts had stopped using slang. The green swing gate with its half effaced words touched him anew. The more he knew of Mrs. Walbridge and her family, the greater seemed the pathos of the name of her house.
"I suppose she named it that years ago when she was young," he thought gently. "I suppose she kept the paint fresh at first, and then later it didn't seem worth while."
A very modern product was this Oliver Wick—the kind of a man that could not have existed a quarter of a century ago, when young men were either gentlemen or cads, as the saying went. He had set out to make a great fortune and he was going to make it. He was conscious to his finger-tips of his powers and his gift of observation and of managing inferior minds. His habitual language was a jargon composed of journalistic, sporting, and society slang, yet his mind was open to the most tender impressions, his sharp little eyes always ready to soften to a tear, and he loved and read poetry with avidity.