e of her shawl,
'remember what I tell you. That's the best man in the world, but I hope
to gracious goodness as none of you will ever grow up like him. He's
enough to break the patience of a saint. If Job'd ha' lived with him,
he'd ha' broke his head with one of his potsherds.'

Then the household laughed at large, for of late years this was the
fashion--this, or something very like it--in which all combative
disputes had ended. It had not always been so. In the earlier years,
which Paul could well remember, before the gray little man had achieved
his triumph of speechless mastery, there had been scenes which bordered
on the terrible.

'And now,' said Mrs. Armstrong, 'what's our Paul to go to London for?'

'He'll finish learning his business there,' said Armstrong. 'In two or
three years' time he ought to be able to come back and take charge of
the place. There's the nucleus of a good trade here, if it had energy
and knowledge brought to bear on it.'

There was an end of spoken opposition, and the fact that Paul was going
to London was accepted. A month went by, and all arrangements were made.
The Rev. Roderic Murchison had left Barfield, and had accepted a call
from some congregation in the outskirts of the great city. He held a
salaried post as well as Metropolitan secretary to his sect, and had
become a person of importance. He was in association with a firm of
printers who worked mainly for the big Nonconformist bodies, and an
odour of sanctity was supposed, by the Armstrong household at least,
to rest upon the labours upon which Paul was about to enter in their
office. Paul had examples of the office craftsmanship set before him.
Technically they were excellent, but their literary form was not of the
highest order. He learned that a hundred and odd workmen were engaged,
and he pictured them as a set of square-toes whose talk would be guarded
and pious and narrow, for in his innocence he imagined the men who
translated good books into type were necessarily good, and the men who
translated into type the goody-goody were of that spiritual complexion.

Paul and his father travelled up to London together on a Thursday.
They found lodgings in Charterhouse Square at the house of a sprightly
black-eyed lady, whose husband, long deceased, had been a Nonconformist
minister. She was very smiling and gracious, and Paul thought her a
charming woman, but he got out of her good books very early, and never
knew how for years