
THREE:"Of course," he said, slowly, "you don't understand. It isn't to be expected that you would understand. Why, you haven't even got a clock! That was the first thing I noticed about you.""Yes, I'm going to take that away with me to-day."
FORE:Mr Keeling was almost as surfeited with this conversation as was John. It appeared to him that though Mr Silverdale wished to give the impression that he was talking about his flock, he was really talking about himself, and seemed to find it an unusually engrossing topic. This notion was strongly confirmed when he found{59} himself with him afterwards over a cigarette and a glass of port, for Mr Silverdale seemed to have a never-ending fund of anecdotes about besotted wife-beaters and scoffing atheists who were really dear fellows with any quantity of good in them, as was proved from the remarkable response they invariably made to his ministrations. These stories seemed to be about them, but in each the point was that their floods of tears and subsequent baptism, confirmation, or death-bed, as the case might be, were the result of the moment when they first came across Mr Silverdale, who, as he told those edifying occurrences, had an air of boisterous jollity, cracking nuts in his teeth to impress John, and sipping his port with the air of a connoisseur to impress his host, and interspersing the conversions with knowing allusions to famous vintages. Subconsciously or consciously (probably the latter) he was living up to the idea of being all things to all men, without considering that it was possible to be the wrong thing to the wrong man. "We have seen such lots of things to-daylots and lots. I can't begin to tell you all in this letter, and there is so much that I don't know where to commence. Well, we went into some shops and looked at the things they had to sell, but didn't buy anything, as we thought it was too soon. One of the shops I liked very much was where they sold silk. It wasn't much like a silk-shop at home, where you sit on a stool in front of a counter and have the clerks spread the things out before you. In this shop the silk was in boxes out of sight, and they only showed you what you asked for. There was a platform in the middle of the shop, and the clerks squatted down on this platform, and unrolled their goods. Two women were there, buying some bright-colored stuff, for making a dress, I suppose, but I don't know. One man sat in the corner with a yardstick ready to measure off what was wanted, and another sat close by him looking on to see that everything was all right. Back of him there were a lot of boxes piled up with the goods in them; and whenever anything was wanted, he passed it out. You should have seen how solemn they all looked, and how one woman counted on her fingers to see how much it was all coming to, just as folks do at home. In a corner opposite the man with the yardstick there was a man who kept the accounts. He was squatted on the floor like the rest, and had his books all round him; and when a sale was made, he put it down in figures that I couldn't read in a week.
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