He had much to learn in the
cunning of retail trade, and it was a kind of study that went sorely
against the grain with him. Happily, at Christmas time came Norbert
Franks (whom Will had decided _not_ to take into his confidence) and
paid his debt of a hundred and twenty pounds. This set things right
for the moment. Will was able to pay a three-and-a-half per cent.
dividend to his mother and sister, and to fare ahead hopefully.
He would rather not have gone down to The Haws that Christmastide,
but feared that his failure to do so might seem strange. The needful
prevarication cost him so many pangs that he came very near to
confessing the truth; he probably would have done so, had not his
mother been ailing, and, it seemed to him, little able to bear the
shock of such a disclosure. So the honest deception went on. Will
was supposed to be managing a London branch of the Applegarth
business. Great expenditure on advertising had to account for the
smallness of the dividend at first. No one less likely than the
ladies at The Haws to make trouble in such a matter. They had what
sufficed to them, and were content with it. Thinking over this in
shame-faced solitude, Warburton felt a glow of proud thankfulness
that his mother and sister were so unlike the vulgar average of
mankind--that rapacious multitude, whom nothing animates but a
chance of gain, with whom nothing weighs but a commercial argument.
A new tenderness stirred within him, and resolutely he stamped under
foot the impulses of self-esteem, of self-indulgence, which made his
life hard to bear.
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