, do
yer? What about learning not to leave Mrs. Brown's parcel at Mrs.
Pipkin's?") Had I ever been to London, the boy asked, his big eyes full
on my face. Had I ever seen a Marconi station? I talked to him, perhaps
unwisely, of some of the greater affairs. He said nothing. His mouth
remained open and his stare full-orbed.

There was one grey, still Sunday when it was not raining, the grey sky
being exhausted, and I met the grocer's boy a little distance from the
village, sitting on a fence, reading. The boy closed his book when he
saw me, but not before I had noticed that the volume was open at a page
showing one of those highly technical diagrams of involved machinery
which only the elect may read. I took the book--it was a manual of
civil engineering--and asked questions with some humility; for before
the man who understands the manipulating of metals and can make living
servants for himself out of pipes, wheels, and valves, I stand as would
a primitive or an innocent and confiding girl before the magician who
interprets for them oracles. With the confidence of long familiarity
and the faint hauteur of shyness he explained some of the diagrams in
which, at that moment, he was interested.

We talked of them, and of Clayton; for I wished to know how this
grocer's boy, who went about masked with a mouth open a little
fatuously, an insignificant face, goggles, and a hand-truck, himself of
no account in a flat and unremarkable place aside from the press of
life's affairs, had discovered there were hills to which he could lift
his eyes after those humiliating interviews with Mr. Monk concerning
the wrong delivery of cheese and bacon. I was aware of the means by
which news of the outer world got to Clayton. It came in a popular
halfpenny paper, and that outer world must therefore have seemed to
Clayton to be all aeroplanes, musical-comedy girls, dog shows, and Mr.
Lloyd George. The grocer's boy got his tongue free at last, and talked.
He was halt and obscure, but I thought I saw a mind beating against the
elms and stones of the village, and repelled by the concrete, asphalt,
and lodging-houses of the seaside place. But I am impressionable, too.
It may have been my fancy. What the boy finished with was: "There's no
chance here. You never hear of anything."

You never heard of anything. That countryside really looked remote
enough from the centre of affairs, from the place where men,
undistracted by the news and pictures of