End of Volume One.
Volume Two—Chapter One.
Aunt Sophia Visits the City.
Mr Fred. Saxby stopped in front of the Royal Exchange one morning to buy a rose, and spent some time in selecting it. Red ones would not do; yellow he despised. He wanted a delicate white rose, with a dash of blush pink upon its petals; and when he had discovered one, he made no scruple about paying the flower-girl sixpence and carrying it off with the greatest care to deposit in a glass upon his desk, for reasons known only to himself.
He had rather a busy morning in his close, cool, dark office, in a court out of Throgmorton Street—an office where the light of day had a struggle every morning to get down between two tall piles of building, and illumine the room, failing dismally seven or eight months out of the twelve, and leaving the stockbroker to the tender mercies of his gas company and the yellow flame that danced within a globe.
Mr Saxby’s room was “as clean as hands could make it,”—the housekeeper’s words—but all the same it did not seem clean. There was a dingy look about everything, excepting the rose he bought every morning, and himself. In one part of the room was a tiny machine, untouched save by electricity, which went on, unwinding, inking its letters and stamping mile after mile of tape-like paper, informing the reader the while that the shares of this railway were up, of that down; that foreign stocks had made this change, consols were at that, and so on, and so on, while the occupant of the office paid not the slightest heed, but divided his attention between the Times and the rose.
Just in the midst of one of his most earnest inspections of the flower, during which he took a long soft inhalation of its odorous breath, a clerk entered with a card. “Miss Raleigh, sir.”