"I'll let you know if there is anything," said Reggie Burr.
And so it went on. It was too strange how definite these men wanted him to be! As the days passed Clive had the impression that the world was getting larger and larger and emptier and emptier. It seemed as though he could not touch boundaries nor horizons.... It was a new world, and he had no place in it....
The dancing suddenly receded, or rather was pushed and huddled back, as the nurse in old days took one's toys and crammed them into a corner. Clive found it no longer amusing. He was puzzled, and dancing did not help him to any discovery. He found that he had nothing to say to his friends on these occasions. He was aware that they were saying behind his back: "What's come to Clive Toby?... Dull as ditchwater."
He went about with a bemused, blinded expression. He was seeing himself for the first time. Hortons and everything in it had quite a new life for him: Mr. Nix, Fanny, Albert Edward—all these people were earning their living and earning it much more efficiently than he seemed to be able to do. All the time behind them seemed to stand that wistful figure of his father. "I'd like to do something for the old man," he thought.
Down in the City his experiences were very strange. The first three men whom he saw were very polite and jolly, and said "they'd let him know if anything turned up." They asked him what business experience he had had, and then how much money he was prepared to put into a "concern"; and when he had answered them with a jolly laugh and said that he had had no experience, but had no doubt that he "would shake down all right," and that he had no money, but "really would take his coat off and work," they smiled, and said that "things were bad in the City just now, but they would let him know."
They all liked him, he felt, and he liked them, and that was as far as it went. But his experience with his fourth friend was different. Sir James Maradick, Bart., could scarcely be called a friend of his. He had met him once at someone's house; Reggie Burr had given him a note to him. He was a big broad man somewhere near sixty, and he was as nice to Clive as possible, but he didn't mince matters.
He had been given his Baronetcy for some fine organising work that he had done in the war. Clive, who did not think much about men as a rule, liked him better than any man he'd ever met. "This fellow would do for me," he thought.
The question, however, was whether Clive would do for Maradick.
"What have you done?" Maradick asked.