view.
However, folks must call the place something, if only for the letters;
and Bellevue looked well on them and sounded airy, and she was never the
one for change. This sounded so like the beginning of a discourse on
things in general that Percival thanked her and fled.

It was about ten minutes' walk to Mr. Ferguson's office. There, week
after week, he toiled with dull industry. He could not believe that his
drudgery would last: something--death perhaps--must come to break the
monotony of that slowly unwinding chain of days, which was like a
grotesquely dreary dream. To have flung himself heart and soul into his
work not only demanded an effort of which he felt himself incapable,
but it seemed to him that such an effort could only serve to identify
him with this hideous life. So, with head bowed over interminable pages,
he labored with patient indifference. On his left sat a clerk ten or
fifteen years older than himself, a white-faced man, who blinked like an
owl in sunlight and had a wearisome cough. There was always a sickly
smell of lozenges about him, and he was fretful if every window was not
tightly closed. On Percival's right was a sallow youth of nineteen. He
worked by fits and starts, sometimes driving his pen along as if the
well-being of the universe depended on the swift completion of his task
and the planets might cease to revolve if he were idle, while a few
minutes later he would be drawing absently on his blotting-paper or
feeling for his whiskers, as if they might have arrived suddenly without
his being aware of it. Probably he was thinking over his next speech at
the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society. They debated high and
important matters at their weekly meetings. They inquired, "Was Oliver
Cromwell justified in putting King Charles to death?" they read
interesting papers about it, and voted the unlucky monarch into or out
of his grave with an energy which would have allowed him little rest if
it could have taken effect. They marshalled many arguments to decide the
knotty and important question, "Does our Country owe most to the Warrior
or the Statesman?" and they made up their minds and voted about that
too. The sallow young man was rather a distinguished member of the
society, and had much to say on such problems as these.

The clerks did not like Thorne. They felt that he was not one of
themselves, and said that he was stuck up and sulky. They resented his
silence. If you do not like a ma