"I don't deny I have felt it calling," I admitted.
"'Course you did—there is nothing else in the world."
"Ah, how much else, Andrews!" I told him sadly.
Whether he has heard of my failure or not I cannot tell. If he has, he was tact itself.
"Here are some beautiful things for you to see," he announced, bustling as he led me to a table in the rear of the shop. I looked at his beautiful things and was able to give him some useful points about one or two of them. He has actually come upon a Caxton, the lucky devil! This was indeed "my own", as Andrews was shrewd enough to divine. Ça me connait. And his courtesy and his deference were strangely consoling in the light of my recent experiences. Courtesy and deference cost others so little, but what refreshing manna they are to one's self-respect!
I go on tramping the pavements of New York and I wish there were more point in my trampings.
Every morning I go forth with a faint glow of hope, and the dim basis of my hope, when I come to think it out, is something like this: In the haunts of men I may meet somebody, an old acquaintance who may know or hear of something whereby a broken reed like myself, a pronounced failure, may get the chance of earning a livelihood. A desperate enough situation when reduced to the glaring light of plain speech—but that is the best that I am able to do. If only Dibdin were here! Despairingly I am in need of a friend. But my past life has separated and insulated me, so that when I think of friends and my thought convulsively darts out this way and that, it encounters nothing but vacancy, empty air. Fred Salmon is avoiding the Club. He is the only one who had reached to me from the past, and the result I have already recorded. I am not eager to meet him, though I have worn out any hostility I may have felt toward him. C'est un mauvais metier que celui de medire. I find my inward man the better for thinking of Fred neutrally, when I think of him at all.
Illness was the one thing lacking to my ineffable Pilgrim's Progress, so infallibly illness has appeared.
Jimmie came down with measles on Saturday and yesterday Alicia followed his example. The crumpling of Alicia under illness has proved like the shattering of a column in the edifice of my household. The whole insecure structure is tottering. And though she is burning with fever, the unhappy girl is murmuring with anxiety that stockings go unmended and buttons unsewn.
"Don't you worry about that, little girl," I keep telling her. "Griselda will do those things."