cupied with the important present.
He and she had both of them relied on their judgment of character as
regarded each other's worthiness and trustworthiness. And he was the
last man in the world to be a chancellor of the exchequer. To him, money
was a quite uninteresting token that had to pass through your hands. He
had always had enough of it. He had always had too much of it. Even at
Putney he had had too much of it. The better part of Henry Leek's two
hundred pounds remained in his pockets, and under his own will he had
his pound a week, of which he never spent more than a few shillings. His
distractions were tobacco (which cost him about twopence a day), walking
about and enjoying colour effects and the oddities of the streets (which
cost him nearly nought), and reading: there were three shops of Putney
where all that is greatest in literature could be bought for
fourpence-halfpenny a volume. Do what he could, he could not read away
more than ninepence a week. He was positively accumulating money. You
may say that he ought to have compelled Alice to accept money. The idea
never occurred to him. In his scheme of things money had not been a
matter of sufficient urgency to necessitate an argument with one's wife.
She was always welcome to all that he had.

And now suddenly, money acquired urgency in his eyes. It was most
disturbing. He was not frightened: he was merely disturbed. If he had
ever known the sensation of wanting money and not being able to obtain
it, he would probably have been frightened. But this sensation was
unfamiliar to him. Not once in his whole career had he hesitated to
change gold from fear that the end of gold was at hand.

All kinds of problems crowded round him.

He went out for a stroll to escape the problems. But they accompanied
him. He walked through exactly the same streets as had delighted him in
the morning. And they had ceased to delight him. This surely could not
be ideal Putney that he was in! It must be some other place of the same
name. The mismanagement of a brewery a hundred and fifty miles from
London; the failure of the British working-man to drink his customary
pints in several scattered scores of public-houses, had most
unaccountably knocked the bottom out of the Putney system of practical
philosophy. Putney posters were now merely disgusting, Putney trade
gross and futile, the tobacconist a narrow-minded and stupid bourgeois;
and so on.

Alice and he met on their doorste