drawing-room. Both these names seemed `grand'
to Edwin, who had never sat in any but a sitting-room. Edwin had never
dined; he had merely had dinner. And, having dined, to walk
ceremoniously into another room! (Odd! After all, his father was a man
of tremendous initiative.) Would he and Maggie be able to do the thing
naturally? Then there was the square hall--positively a room! That
alone impelled him to a new life. When he thought of it all, the
reception-rooms, the scientific kitchen, the vast scullery, the four
large bedrooms, the bathroom, the three attics, the cistern-room
murmurous with water, and the water tirelessly, inexhaustibly coursing
up and down behind walls--he thrilled to fine impulses.

He took courage. He braced himself. The seriousness which he had felt
on the day of leaving school revisited him. He looked back across the
seven years of his life in the world, and condemned them unsparingly.
He blamed no one but Edwin. He had forgiven his father for having
thwarted his supreme ambition; long ago he had forgiven his father;
though, curiously, he had never quite forgiven Mrs Hamps for her share
in the catastrophe. He honestly thought he had recovered from the
catastrophe undisfigured, even unmarked. He knew not that he would
never be the same man again, and that his lightest gesture and his
lightest glance were touched with the wistfulness of resignation. He
had frankly accepted the fate of a printer. And in business he was
convinced, despite his father's capricious complaints, that he had
acquitted himself well. In all the details of the business he
considered himself superior to his father. And Big James would
invariably act on his secret instructions given afterwards to counteract
some misguided hasty order of the old man's.

It was the emptiness of the record of his private life that he
condemned. What had he done for himself? Nothing large! Nothing
heroic and imposing! He had meant to pursue certain definite courses of
study, to become the possessor of certain definite groups of books, to
continue his drawing and painting, to practise this, that and the other,
to map out all his spare time, to make rules and to keep them,--all to
the great end of self-perfecting. He had said: "What does it matter
whether I am an architect or a printer, so long as I improve myself to
the best of my powers?" He hated young men who talked about improving
themselves. He spurned the Young Men'