in that landed him in the City at nine.
Before half-past he was in the front shop, taking a look round.

And as he looked round and surveyed his possessions, his new stock on
the shelves, his plate-glass and his mahogany fittings, his
assistants, from the boy in shirt sleeves now washing down the great
front window to the gentlemanly cashier, high collared and
frock-coated, in his pew, he rubbed his hands softly, and his heart
swelled with thankfulness and pride. For Isaac Rickman was a dreamer,
too, in his way. There are dreams and dreams, and the incontestable
merit and glory of Isaac's dreams was that they had all, or very
nearly all, come true. They were of the sort that can be handed over
the counter, locked up in a cash-box and lodged in the Bank. His
latest dream had been carried out in plate-glass and mahogany; it
towered into space and was finished off with a beautiful pink cupola
at the top.

There was not much of the father in the son. Keith, presumably, took
after his mother, a hectic, pale-haired, woman who had died in the
supreme effort of his birth. On her own birth there had been something
in the nature of a slur. She had taken it to heart, and exhausted
herself in the endeavour to conceal from her very respectable husband
the shameful fact that she had once served as barmaid in a City
restaurant, and that she was the illegitimate daughter of a village
sempstress and a village squire. Isaac, before he dreamed of
greatness, had met her at a Band of Hope meeting, and had married her
because of her sweetness and pathetic beauty. She left to her boy her
fairness, her expressive face, her own nerves and her mother's
passion. Isaac and he were alike only in a certain slenderness, a
fleshless refinement of physique. Coarseness in grain, usually
revealed by the lower half of a man's countenance, had with the elder
Rickman taken up its abode in the superior, the intellectual region.
Isaac's eyes and forehead trafficked grossly with the world, while the
rest of his face preserved the stern reticences and sanctities of the
spirit. Isaac was a Wesleyan; and his dress (soft black felt hat,
smooth black frock-coat, narrow tie, black but clerical) almost
suggested that he was a minister of that persuasion. His lips were
hidden under an iron grey moustache, the short grizzled beard was
smoothed forward and fined to a point by the perpetual caress of a
meditative hand. Such was Isaac.

Impossible to deny a certain ge