“That’s Mr. Powys, Mr. John,” said Mr. Wrinkell, calmly, and with a complacent little nod. The vizier rather liked to snub the heir-apparent when he could, and somehow the Canadian had crept into his good graces too.
“By Jove! and who the deuce is Mr. Powys?” said Jack, with unbecoming impatience, almost loud enough to reach the stranger’s ear.
“Hush,” said Mr. Wrinkell, “he has come in young Jones’s place, who left at Michaelmas, you know. I should say he was a decided addition; steady, very steady--punctual in the morning--clever at his work--always up to his hours--”
“Oh, I see, a piece of perfection,” said Jack, with, it must be confessed, a slight sneer. “But I don’t see that he was wanted. Brown was quite able for all the work. I should like to know where you picked that fellow up. It’s very odd that something always happens when I am absent for a single day.”
“The frost has lasted for ten days,” said Mr. Wrinkell, with serious but mild reproof--“not that I think there is any thing in that. We are only young once in this life; and there is nothing particular doing. I am very glad you took advantage of it, Mr. John.”
Now it was one of Jack’s weak points that he hated being called Mr. John, and could not bear to be approved of--two peculiarities of which Mr. Wrinkell was very thoroughly aware. But the vizier had many privileges. He was serious and substantial, and not a man who could be called a cad, as Jack called his own contemporaries in the office. Howsoever tiresome or aggravating he might be, he had to be borne with; and he knew his advantages, and was not always generous in the use he made of them. When the young man went off into his own little private room, Mr. Wrinkell was tempted to give a little inward chuckle. He was a dissenter, and he rather liked to put the young autocrat down. “He has too much of his own way--too much of his own way,” he said to himself, and went against Jack on principle, and for his good, which is a kind of conduct not always appreciated by those for whose good it is kept up.
And from that moment a kind of opposition, not to say enmity, crept up between Jack and the new clerk--a sort of feeling that they were rather too like each other, and were not practicable in the same hemisphere. Jack tried, but found it did not answer, to call the new-comer a cad. He did not, like the others, follow Jack’s own ways at a woful distance, and copy those things for which Jack rather despised himself, as all cads have a way of doing; but had his own way, and was himself, Powys, not the least like the Browns and Robinsons. The very first evening, as they were driving home together, Jack, having spent the day in a close examination of the new-comer, thought it as well to let his father know his opinion on the subject, which he did as they flew along in their dogcart, with the wicked mare which Jack could scarcely hold in, and the sharp wind whizzing past their ears, that were icy cold with speed.