'It is a sad business,' said Simms, 'but we all have our trials.'
'I would try to bear up better,' said the sad man, 'if I got more sympathy.'
It was very late when Simms and Rob left the Wigwam, yet they were amongst the first to go.
'When does the club close?' Rob asked, as they got into the fresh air.
'No one knows,' answered Simms wearily, 'but I believe the last man to go takes in the morning's milk.'
In the weeks that followed Rob worked hard at political articles for the Wire, and at last began to feel that he was making some headway. He had not the fatal facility for scribbling that distinguishes some journalists, but he had felt life before he took to writing. His style was forcible if not superfine, and he had the faculty that makes a journalist, of only seeing things from one point of view. The successful political writer is blind in one eye.
Though one in three of Rob's articles was now used, the editor of the Wire did not write to say that he liked them, and Rob never heard any one mention them. Even Simms would not read them, but then Simms never read any paper. He got his news from the placards, and bought the Scalping Knife, not to read his own articles, but to measure them and calculate how much he would get for them. Then he dropped them into the gutter.
Some weeks had passed without Rob's seeing Simms, when one day he got a letter that made him walk round and round his table like a circus horse. It was from the editor of the Wire, asking him to be in readiness to come to the office any evening he might be wanted to write. This looked like a step toward an appointment on the staff if he gave satisfaction (a proviso which he took complacently), and Rob's chest expanded, till the room seemed quite small. He pictured Thrums again. He jumped to Mary Abinger, and then he distinctly saw himself in the editorial chair of the Times. He was lying back in it, smoking a cigar, and giving a Cabinet minister five minutes.
Nearly six months had passed since Rob saw Miss Abinger—a long time for a young man to remain in love with the same person. Of late Rob had been less given to dreaming than may be expected of a man who classifies the other sex into one particular lady and others, but Mary was coming to London in the early summer, and when he thought of summer he meant Mary. Rob was oftener in Piccadilly in May than he had been during the previous four months, and he was always looking for somebody. It was the third of June, a day to be remembered in his life, that he heard from the editor of the Wire. At five o'clock he looked upon that as what made it a day of days, but he had changed his mind by a quarter past.
Rob had a silk hat now, and he thrust it on his head, meaning to run downstairs to tell Simms of his good fortune. He was in the happy frame of mind that makes a man walk round improbabilities, and for the first time since he came to London he felt confident of the future, without becoming despondent immediately afterwards. The future, like the summer, was an allegory for Miss Abinger. For the moment Rob's heart filled with compassion for Simms. The one thing our minds will not do is leave our neighbours alone, and Rob had some time before reached the conclusion that Simms's nature had been twisted by a disappointment in love. There was nothing else that could account for his fits of silence, his indifference to the future. He was known to have given the coat off his back to some miserable creature in the street, and to have been annoyed when he discovered that a friend saw him do it. Though Simms's walls were covered with engravings, Rob remembered all at once that there was not a female figure in one of them.