did you get on all right?”

“Yes: they only say my writing’s bad. But Mr. Pappleworth—he’s my man—said to Mr. Jordan I should be all right. I’m Spiral, mother; you must come and see. It’s ever so nice.”

Soon he liked Jordan’s. Mr. Pappleworth, who had a certain “saloon bar” flavour about him, was always natural, and treated him as if he had been a comrade. Sometimes the “Spiral boss” was irritable, and chewed more lozenges than ever. Even then, however, he was not offensive, but one of those people who hurt themselves by their own irritability more than they hurt other people.

“Haven’t you done that yet?” he would cry. “Go on, be a month of Sundays.”

Again, and Paul could understand him least then, he was jocular and in high spirits.

“I’m going to bring my little Yorkshire terrier bitch tomorrow,” he said jubilantly to Paul.

“What’s a Yorkshire terrier?”

“Don’t know what a Yorkshire terrier is? Don’t know a Yorkshire―” Mr. Pappleworth was aghast.

“Is it a little silky one—colours of iron and rusty silver?”

“That’s it, my lad. She’s a gem. She’s had five pounds’ worth of pups already, and she’s worth over seven pounds herself; and she doesn’t weigh twenty ounces.”

The next day the bitch came. She was a shivering, miserable morsel. Paul did not care for her; she seemed so like a wet rag that would never dry. Then a man called for her, and began to make coarse jokes. But Mr. Pappleworth nodded his head in the direction of the boy, and the talk went on sotto voce.cp

Mr. Jordan only made one more excursion to watch Paul, and then the only fault he found was seeing the boy lay his pen on the counter.

“Put your pen in your ear, if you’re going to be a clerk. Pen in your ear!” And one day he said to the lad: “Why don’t you hold your shoulders straighter? Come down here,” when he took him into the glass office and fitted him with special braces for keeping the shoulders square.

But Paul liked the girls best. The men seemed common and rather dull. He liked them all, but they were uninteresting. Polly, the little brisk overseer downstairs, finding Paul eating in the cellar, asked him if she could cook him anything on her little stove. Next day his mother gave him a dish that could be heated up. He took it into the pleasant, clean room to Polly. And very soon it grew to be an established custom that he should have dinner with her. When he came in at eight in the morning he took his basket to her, and when he came down at one o’clock she had his dinner ready.

She was not very tall, and pale, with thick chestnut hair, irregular features, and a wide, full mouth. She was like a small bird. He often called her a “robinet.”cq Though naturally rather quiet, he would sit and chatter with her for hours telling her about his home. The girls all liked to hear him talk. They often gathered in a little circle while he sat on a bench, and held forth to them, laughing. Some of them regarded him as a curious little creature, so serious, yet so bright and jolly, and always so delicate in his way with them. They all liked him, and he adored them. Polly he felt he belonged to. Then Connie, with her mane of red hair, her face of apple-blossom, her murmuring voice, such a lady in her shabby black frock, appealed to his romantic side.

“When you sit winding,” he said, “it looks as if you were spinning at a spinning-wheel-it looks ever so nice. You remind me of Elaine in the ‘Idylls of the King.’4 I’d draw you if I could.”

And she glanced at him blushing shyly. And later on he had a sketch he prized very much: Connie sitting on the stool before the wheel, her flowing mane of red hair on her rusty black frock, her red mouth shut and serious, running the scarlet thread off the hank on to the reel.

With Louie, handsome and brazen, who always seemed to thrust her hip at him, he usually joked.

Emma was rather plain, rather old, and condescending. But to condescend to him made her happy, and he did not mind.

“How do you put needles in?” he asked.

“Go away and don’t bother.”

“But I ought to know how to put needles in.”

She ground at her machine all the while steadily.

“There are many things you ought to know,” she