There's a
damsel at the Crystal Palace--but this doesn't interest you, you
old misogynist."
"Old what?" exclaimed Warburton, with an air of genuine surprise.
"Have I got the word wrong? I'm not much of a classic--"
"The word's all right. But that's your idea of me, is it?"
The artist stood and gazed at his friend with an odd expression, as
if a joke had been arrested on his lips by graver thought.
"Isn't it true?"
"Perhaps it is; yes, yes, I daresay."
And he turned at once to another subject.
CHAPTER 3
The year was 1886.
When at business, Warburton sat in a high, bare room, which looked
upon little Ailie Street, in Whitechapel; the air he breathed had a
taste and odour strongly saccharine. If his eye strayed to one of
the walls, he saw a map of the West Indies; if to another, it fell
upon a map of St. Kitts; if to the third, there was before him a
plan of a sugar estate on that little island. Here he sat for
certain hours of the solid day, issuing orders to clerks, receiving
commercial callers, studying trade journals in sundry languages--
often reading some book which had no obvious reference to the
sugar-refining industry. It was not Will's ideal of life, but hither
he had suffered himself to be led by circumstance, and his musings
suggested no practicable issue into a more congenial world.
The death of his father when he was sixteen had left him with a
certain liberty for shaping a career.
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