"I suppose you've done," said Doubleday, looking round at this point; "if so you can hook it."
"I haven't quite," said I, dashing back to my work.
I finished at last, and before Jack had come out of the inner-room too.
I handed my papers to Doubleday, who looked at them critically.
"Well," he said, "that's a pretty show. Have a look at this, Wallop, I say. Your youngest grandchild could make his sevens nearly as well as that!"
As Mr Wallop was about eighteen years old, I ventured to regard this language as figurative on the part of Mr Doubleday, and trusted the sevens were not quite as bad as he made out.
"All right," said Doubleday, "you can cut home to your mother-in-law. You'll probably hear no more about it. There's millions of other loafers after the berth."
"Let's see, this is the nineteenth century, ain't it? Call again about the year two thousand. February the thirty-first's the most convenient day for us, we're all at home then. Ta-ta."
I departed rather disconsolately, and waited half an hour outside in the street for Smith.
"Well," said I, when presently he appeared, "how did you get on?"
"Not very grand," said he. "I had to do some accounts like you. I heard one of the partners say yours were pretty good when the clerk brought them in."
"Really?" cried I, with pleasure I could hardly disguise. "But, I say, Jack, unless you get on too, it'll be an awful sell."
"I don't know," said I. And I related what I had overheard in the counting-house.
Smith brightened up at this. A very little encouragement was enough to set us building castles in the air. And we did build castles in the air that morning as we paced the crowded city streets.
By the time these architectural exercises were over it was time for me to go back to the station and catch my train; but not before I had tried to extract from Jack what he had been doing with himself since he was expelled from Stonebridge House.
As before, he was very uncommunicative. All I heard was that the reason he didn't get my letters at Packworth was that he had told me, or thought he had told me, to address my letters to "T," and I had always addressed them to "J." But even had I addressed them correctly, he would only have received the first, as a fortnight after he left Stonebridge he went to London, where he had hitherto been working as a grocer's shop-boy. You should have seen the look of disgust with which he referred to this part of his life! But now, having seen Merrett, Barnacle, and Company's advertisement, he was applying for their situation.