One of these he desired to regard with gratitude, but found it difficult to support that feeling. Carter, the vivacious, though at first perfectly unembarrassed in his relations with the City Road clerk, gradually exhibited a change of demeanour. Reardon occasionally found the young man’s eye fixed upon him with a singular expression, and the secretary’s talk, though still as a rule genial, was wont to suffer curious interruptions, during which he seemed to be musing on something Reardon had said, or on some point of his behaviour. The explanation of this was that Carter had begun to think there might be a foundation for Mrs Yule’s hypothesis—that the novelist was not altogether in his sound senses. At first he scouted the idea, but as time went on it seemed to him that Reardon’s countenance certainly had a gaunt wildness which suggested disagreeable things. Especially did he remark this after his return from an August holiday in Norway. On coming for the first time to the City Road branch he sat down and began to favour Reardon with a lively description of how he had enjoyed himself abroad; it never occurred to him that such talk was not likely to inspirit the man who had passed his August between the garret and the hospital, but he observed before long that his listener was glancing hither and thither in rather a strange way.
‘You haven’t been ill since I saw you?’ he inquired.
‘Oh no!’
‘But you look as if you might have been. I say, we must manage for you to have a fortnight off, you know, this month.’
‘I have no wish for it,’ said Reardon. ‘I’ll imagine I have been to Norway. It has done me good to hear of your holiday.’
‘I’m glad of that; but it isn’t quite the same thing, you know, as having a run somewhere yourself.’
‘Oh, much better! To enjoy myself may be mere selfishness, but to enjoy another’s enjoyment is the purest satisfaction, good for body and soul. I am cultivating altruism.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A highly rarefied form of happiness. The curious thing about it is that it won’t grow unless you have just twice as much faith in it as is required for assent to the Athanasian Creed.’
‘Oh!’