to imitate him.

LEXY (stung). I try to follow his example, not to imitate him.

PROSERPINE (coming at him again on her way back to her work). Yes, you
do: you IMITATE him. Why do you tuck your umbrella under your left arm
instead of carrying it in your hand like anyone else? Why do you walk
with your chin stuck out before you, hurrying along with that eager
look in your eyes--you, who never get up before half past nine in the
morning? Why do you say "knoaledge" in church, though you always say
"knolledge" in private conversation! Bah! do you think I don't know?
(She goes back to the typewriter.) Here, come and set about your work:
we've wasted enough time for one morning. Here's a copy of the diary
for to-day. (She hands him a memorandum.)

LEXY (deeply offended). Thank you. (He takes it and stands at the table
with his back to her, reading it. She begins to transcribe her
shorthand notes on the typewriter without troubling herself about his
feelings. Mr. Burgess enters unannounced. He is a man of sixty, made
coarse and sordid by the compulsory selfishness of petty commerce, and
later on softened into sluggish bumptiousness by overfeeding and
commercial success. A vulgar, ignorant, guzzling man, offensive and
contemptuous to people whose labor is cheap, respectful to wealth and
rank, and quite sincere and without rancour or envy in both attitudes.
Finding him without talent, the world has offered him no decently paid
work except ignoble work, and he has become in consequence, somewhat
hoggish. But he has no suspicion of this himself, and honestly regards
his commercial prosperity as the inevitable and socially wholesome
triumph of the ability, industry, shrewdness and experience in business
of a man who in private is easygoing, affectionate and humorously
convivial to a fault. Corporeally, he is a podgy man, with a square,
clean shaven face and a square beard under his chin; dust colored, with
a patch of grey in the centre, and small watery blue eyes with a
plaintively sentimental expression, which he transfers easily to his
voice by his habit of pompously intoning his sentences.)

BURGESS (stopping on the threshold, and looking round). They told me
Mr. Morell was here.

PROSERPINE (rising). He's upstairs. I'll fetch him for you.

BURGESS (staring boorishly at her). You're not the same young lady as
used to typewrite for him?

PROSERPINE. No.

BURGESS (assenting). No: she was younger. (Miss Garnett stolidly s