From his sitting-room he looked on a melancholy street. The unsubstantial houses tried to seem--not respectable, no word so honest could be applied to them, but--genteel, and failed even in that miserable ambition. Percival used to watch the plastered fronts, flaking in the sun and rain, old while yet new, with no grace of bygone memory or present strength, till he fancied that they might be perishing of some foul leprosy like that described in Leviticus. And the wearisome monotony! They were all just alike, except that here and there one was a little dingier than its neighbors, with the railings more broken and the windows dirtier. One day, when his landlady insisted on talking to him and Percival was too courteous to be absolutely silent, he asked where the prospect was from which the street took its name. She said they used to be able to see Three-Corner Green from their attic-windows. In her mother's time there was a tree and a pond there, she believed, and she herself could remember it quite green, a great place for Cheap Jacks and people who preached and sold pills. But now it was all done away with and built over. It was Paradise Place, and Paradise Place wasn't much of a prospect, though there might be worse. But it was no detriment to Mr. Thorne's rooms, for it was only the attic that ever had the view. However, folks must call the place something, if only for the letters; and Bellevue looked well on them and sounded airy, and she was never the one for change. This sounded so like the beginning of a discourse on things in general that Percival thanked her and fled.
It was about ten minutes' walk to Mr. Ferguson's office. There, week after week, he toiled with dull industry. He could not believe that his drudgery would last: something--death perhaps--must come to break the monotony of that slowly unwinding chain of days, which was like a grotesquely dreary dream. To have flung himself heart and soul into his work not only demanded an effort of which he felt himself incapable, but it seemed to him that such an effort could only serve to identify him with this hideous life. So, with head bowed over interminable pages, he labored with patient indifference. On his left sat a clerk ten or fifteen years older than himself, a white-faced man, who blinked like an owl in sunlight and had a wearisome cough. There was always a sickly smell of lozenges about him, and he was fretful if every window was not tightly closed. On Percival's right was a sallow youth of nineteen. He worked by fits and starts, sometimes driving his pen along as if the well-being of the universe depended on the swift completion of his task and the planets might cease to revolve if he were idle, while a few minutes later he would be drawing absently on his blotting-paper or feeling for his whiskers, as if they might have arrived suddenly without his being aware of it. Probably he was thinking over his next speech at the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society. They debated high and important matters at their weekly meetings. They inquired, "Was Oliver Cromwell justified in putting King Charles to death?" they read interesting papers about it, and voted the unlucky monarch into or out of his grave with an energy which would have allowed him little rest if it could have taken effect. They marshalled many arguments to decide the knotty and important question, "Does our Country owe most to the Warrior or the Statesman?" and they made up their minds and voted about that too. The sallow young man was rather a distinguished member of the society, and had much to say on such problems as these.