With decent meekness he
owned himself unfit for the task to which he had set himself.
"I'm only a dub," he groaned--"a poor, God-forsaken, prematurely aged
and indigent dub!"
For ten interminable years the aspiration to do justice to the Genius
of the Place had smouldered in his humble bosom; to-day for the first
time he had attempted to formulate a meet apostrophe to that God of
his Forlorn Destiny; and now he chewed the bitter cud of realisation
that all his eloquence had proved hopelessly poor and lame and
halting.
Perched on the polished seat of a very tall stool, his slender legs
fraternising with its legs in apparently inextricable intimacy; sharp
elbows digging into the nicked and ink-stained bed of a counting-house
desk; chin some six inches above the pages of a huge leather-covered
ledger, hair rumpled and fretful, mouth doleful, eyes disconsolate--he
gloomed...
On this the eve of his thirty-second birthday and likewise the tenth
anniversary of his servitude, the appearance of P. Sybarite was
elaborately normal--varying, as it did, but slightly from one
year's-end to the other.
His occupation had fitted his head and shoulders with a deceptive but
none the less perennial stoop. His means had endowed him with a single
outworn suit of ready-made clothing which, shrinking sensitively on
each successive application of the tailor's sizzling goose, had come
to disclose his person with disconcerting candour--sleeves too short,
trousers at once too short and too narrow, waistcoat buttons straining
over his chest, coat buttons refusing to recognise a buttonhole save
that at the waist.
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