He did not like Perkins. “A good man,” Mr. Marston had called him, “as good a general manager as you’re likely to find anywhere. Not a social beauty; silent, and all that, but a good strong man. You can trust him.”
Roland did not agree with this estimate. First impressions are very often right; he was inclined to trust his intuition before his reason, and his first impression of Perkins was of an embittered, jealous man. “He hates me,” Roland thought, “because I’m stepping straight into this business through influence, with every prospect of becoming a director before I’ve finished; while he’s sweated all his life, and worked from nothing to a position that for all his ability will never carry him to the board room.” He was a man to watch. The people who have been mishandled by fortune show no mercy when they get the chance of revenge.
Perkins was scrupulously polite, but Roland felt how much he resented his intrusion, and Gerald was inclined to endorse this opinion.
“Oh, yes, a sour-faced ass,” he said; “father thinks a lot of him, though. It’s as well to keep on the right side of him. He can make things rather awkward if you don’t. He keeps an eye on most of the accounts, and he watches the travelers’ expenses pretty closely. If he gets annoyed with you he might start questioning your extras.”
They laughed, remembering how they had entered under the heading “special expenses” the charges for a lurid evening at a certain discreet establishment in the Rue des Colombes.
On the whole, Roland was happy at the office, but the evenings were distressing: the bus ride back; the walk up the hot stuffy street towards his home; the subsequent walk with his father; the same walk every day along the hard, flag-stoned roads, during which they met the same dispirited men hurrying home from work. London was horrible in June, with its metallic heat, its dust, and the dull leaves of the plane-trees scattering their mournful shadows. How somber, too, were the long evenings after the wretched two-course dinner, in the small suburban drawing-room--ill lit, ill ventilated, meanly furnished. It was not surprising that he should accept eagerly the Marstons’ frequent invitations to spend the week-end with them in the country; it was another world, a cleaner, fresher world, where you were met at the station, where you drove through a long, winding drive to an old Georgian house, where you dressed for dinner, where you drank crusted port as you cracked your walnuts. Yet it was not this material well-being that he so highly valued as the setting it provided for a gracious interchange of courtesy, for the leisured preliminaries of friendship, for ornament and decoration.