The door closed after him with a loud resounding slam, rattled on its hinges, and was still.
Pangbutt stood brooding with frowning eyes fixed upon it:
He shrugged his shoulders:
“Lovegood never loses the grand manner,” he thought, “even when he has no necktie. Damnation! the Past seems never to be buried.... We think the day is dead because we blowout the candle and lie down at night. We forget the world’s the same—’tis we that sleep. Tush! the Past is never dead—until it’s our winding-sheet——”
He saw himself reflected in a large mirror. He gazed at the well-groomed man of the world that stood there in the mirrored make-believe room, solid as he; and he laughed bitterly as it came to him that this dandified spruce shadow that mimicked his magnificence had thought to shake off at a wish the years of sordid striving together with the Things that had been Done and Rejected and—Forsaken!... Tshah; he had been congratulating this spruce fellow upon it only a few minutes gone by—thanking his most gentlemanly star that he had done with the whole gang. And to-day—they were pushing stealthily at his doors, creeping into his magnificent home, nay, bursting into his life again—thrusting jeering faces into his, whether he would or not. Indeed, his smug shadow sneered at him—for behind the well-bred silence of his old comrades was the knowledge of his low origin—and he had no pride in aught but hiding what had been to a bigger man his source of pride.
Perhaps he ought to help—for decency’s sake; but——
Strange—these were the very people who had given him his chance in life. But for them, he had still been a mediocrity in Paris.
But why should he have the whole crew “hail-fellow”?
If a man is to rise above the crowd he must stand alone—be rid of encumbrances——
He started: