on. The fathers of the town, and the
mothers, who liked Edwin's complexion and fair hair, told each other
that not every parent was so fortunate as Mr Clayhanger, and what a
blessing it was that the old breed was not after all dying out in those
newfangled days. Edwin could not escape from the universal assumption.
He felt it round him as a net which somehow he had to cut.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

THE ARCHITECT.

One morning Edwin was busy in the shop with his own private minion, the
paper boy, who went in awe of him. But this was not the same Edwin,
though people who could only judge by features, and by the length of
trousers and sleeves on legs and arms, might have thought that it was
the same Edwin enlarged and corrected. Half a year had passed. The
month was February, cold. Mr Enoch Peake had not merely married Mrs
Louisa Loggerheads, but had died of an apoplexy, leaving behind him
Cocknage Gardens, a widow, and his name painted in large letters over
the word `Loggerheads' on the lintel of the Dragon. The steam-printer
had done the funeral cards, and had gone to the burial of his hopes of
business in that quarter. Many funeral cards had come out of the same
printing office during the winter, including that of Mr Udall, the
great marble-player. It seemed uncanny to Edwin that a marble-player
whom he had actually seen playing marbles should do anything so solemn
as expire. However, Edwin had perfectly lost all interest in marbles;
only once in six months had he thought of them, and that once through a
funeral card. Also he was growing used to funeral cards. He would
enter an order for funeral cards as nonchalantly as an order for
butterscotch labels. But it was not deaths and the spectacle of life as
seen from the shop that had made another Edwin of him.

What had changed him was the slow daily influence of a large number of
trifling habitual duties none of which fully strained his faculties, and
the monotony of them, and the constant watchful conventionality of his
deportment with customers. He was still a youth, very youthful, but you
had to keep an eye open for his youthfulness if you wished to find it
beneath the little man that he had been transformed into. He now took
his watch out of his pocket with an absent gesture and look exactly like
his father's; and his tones would be a reflection of those of the last
important full-sized man with whom he had happened to have been in
contact