“Then I have made a mistake, that’s all,” said Holdsworth, surveying the manager with great disgust; and paying no further heed to the protests with which the other followed him to the door, he walked into the High Street.
This summary treatment was enough to last him one day. His indignation yielded to depression, and he returned slowly and moodily to his lodgings.
This was the first time in his life he had ever made an application for employment; and his reception, which was really genteel and civil compared to the receptions experienced by men, old and young, every day, in search of work, at the hands of employers, wounded his sensibility and filled him with a sense of degradation.
He regained his lodgings, and endeavoured to console himself with philosophy.
But philosophy, says Rochefoucauld, triumphs over future and past ills; but present ills triumph over philosophy.
His sensibility did not smart the less because he reflected that hundreds of better men than himself had been insulted by rejections as offensive as that with which his inquiry had been encountered.
Thoughts of something tender and innocent will often quell the stubbornest warmth. Holdsworth grew mild in a moment when his mind went to little Nelly.
“I’ll try the brewery to-morrow,” he said to himself; “and if that fails me, I’ll advertise for a situation; and if nothing comes of that, I’ll start a school.”
Thus thinking he walked to the window, hoping to see his child in the road.
Nobody was visible but the old politician with the inflamed face, who was pacing slowly along the pavement, his hands locked behind him, his eyes bent downwards, and his brow frowning grimly. Presently, Holdsworth knew, the other old politician, who lived at the corner house, would come out, and there would be much gesticulation, and violent declamation, and frequent pauses, and moppings of the forehead with red silk pocket-handkerchiefs. Rain had fallen in the night, and cleansed the little gardens in front of the villas of the three weeks’ accumulation of dust that had settled upon them, and freshened up the leaves and grass. In the bit of ground before Mrs. Parrot’s house the flowers had withered on their stalks, but the shrubs still wore the bright greenness of summer; the soil was dark and rich with the grateful moisture, and breathed a fragrance of its own upon the morning air.