Mr. Henry Butson had fallen on good fortune.  No more would he endure the humiliation of begging a job of an unsympathetic gaffer.  In future his life would be one of ease, free from ignoble exertion and unshamed by dungaree overalls.  And he made it so.  For a little while, his wife seemed to indulge in an absurd expectation that he would resume his search for occupation of one sort or another.  Once she even hinted it, but he soon demolished that fancy, and in terms that prevented any more hints.  He had little patience with such foolishness, indeed.  The matter was simple enough.  Why did a man work?  Merely to get shelter and food and clothes and comfort, and hair-oil, whatever he wanted to drink and smoke, and his necessary pocket-money.  A man who could get these things without working would be a fool to work; more, he would behave inhumanly to his fellow man by excluding him from a job.  As for himself, he got what he needed easily enough, without the trouble of even taking down the shop-shutters: a vulgar act repellent to his nature.

So he rose at ten, or eleven, or twelve, as the case might be, and donned fine raiment; the most fashionable p. 190suit procurable from the most fashionable shop in Aldgate.  He began at Aldgate; but in time he grew more fastidious, and went to a tailor in Leadenhall Street, a tailor whose daily task was to satisfy the tastes of the most particular among the ship-brokers’ clerks of St. Mary Axe.  His toilet complete, his curls well oiled, Mr. Butson descended to a breakfast of solitary state—Nan’s had been hurried over hours ago.  The rest of the day was given as occasion prompted.  When the weather was fine, nothing pleased him better, nor more excellently agreed with his genteel propensities, than to go for a stroll up West.  When Harbour Lane was quiet and empty (he seemed to choose such times for going out) he would slip round to the station, and by train and omnibus gain the happy region.  He was careful to take with him enough money to secure some share of the polite gratifications proper to the quarter, and minutely acquainted himself with the manners and customs of all the bars in the Strand and about Piccadilly Circus.  And although he was a little astonished when first he was charged eighteenpence for an American drink, he was careful not to show it, and afterwards secretly congratulated himself on the refined instinct that had pitched on so princely a beverage in the dark, so to speak.  He took air, too, in Hyde Park, to the great honour of his whiskers, and much improved his manner of leaning on a rail and of sitting in a green chair.  In the evening p. 191he tried, perhaps, a music hall, but always some of the bars, and arrived home at night rather late, sometimes a trifle unsteady, and usually in a bad temper.  Bad temper was natural, indeed, in the circumstances; after so many hours’ indulgence in the delights of fashionable society it revolted his elegant nature to have to return at last to a vulgar little chandler’s-shop in a riverside street, where a wife in a print bodice and a white apron was sitting up for him; sometimes even crying—for nothing at all—as if the circumstances were not depressing enough for him already.

These little excursions cost money, of course, but then what was the good of keeping an ignoble little shop if you couldn’t get money out of it?  And the shop did very well.  Mrs. Butson and the girl—the cripple—were boiling bacon (the smell was disgusting) all day long, and they sold it as fast as it was cold.  And other things sold excellently ............