old-fashioned way of spending an hour. Certainly, it was the way for ale
to taste good, and a pipe to seem the most satisfying of all earthly
consolations. It was almost worth the bondage to enjoy the keen relish
of the escape.

By degrees, though the youngest there, Henry came to be allowed a
certain leadership in these sorties of the human element. He made it his
business to stimulate these unthrifty instincts, and to fan the welcome
sparks of natural idleness; and so successfully that at times there
seemed to have entered with him into that gloomy place a certain Bacchic
influence, which now and again would prompt his comrades to such daring
clutches of animated release, that the spirit of it even pervaded the
penetralia of the senior partner's office, with the result that some
mishap of truancy would undo the genial work of months, and precipitate
upon them for a while the rigours of a ten-fold discipline. It was after
such an occasion that, in writing to James Mesurier as to the progress
of his son, old Mr. Septimus Lingard had paid Henry one of the proudest
compliments of his young days. "I fear that we shall make little of your
son Henry," he wrote. "His head seems full of literature, and he is so
idle that he is demoralising the whole office."

It took Henry more than a year to win that testimonial; but the odds had
been so great against him that the wonder is he was ever able to win it
at all. Mr. Lingard wrote "demoralise." It was his way of saying
"humanise."

CHAPTER XI

HUMANITY IN HIGH PLACES

One day, however, Henry was to make the still more surprising discovery,
that not only were the clerks human beings, but that one of the
partners--only one of them--was also human. He made this discovery about
the senior partner, whose old-world figure and quaint name, Septimus
Searle Lingard, had, in spite of his severity, attracted him by a
certain musty distinction.

A stranger figure than Septimus Searle Lingard has seldom walked the
streets of any town. Though not actually much over sixty, you would have
said he must be a thousand; his abnormally long, narrow, shaven face was
so thin and gaunt and hollowed, and his tall, upright figure was so
painfully fragile, that his black broadcloth seemed almost too heavy for
the worn frame inside it. And nothing in the world else was ever so
piercingly solemn as his keen weary old eyes. With his tall silk hat,
his thin white hair, his long white face, long b