‘It’s all right; he’s at a directors’ meeting. Will you take a seat, please; Mr Graby’ll be here any minute now,’ said the pretty, fair child who had shown him in. Despite his elegance, his fierce air and his height, she calmly divined that he was both very young and very nervous and wanted to comfort him.

Francis thanked her, fixing her with his meaning and flirtatious eye, and she went smiling away.

The place is seething with girls!

The ecstatic thought sang beneath his apprehensions. He had seen two in the lift, giggling; one coming along the corridor, haughty; and three pattering down the stairs just outside Mr Graby’s room, businesslike.

And they were all about eighteen, slender, curled and painted, pretty. The place was a gold mine, a honey hive! Oh, if only he could get the job!

He went over to the window and stared at the busy, glittering river until his eyes ached, and then he examined the specimens of mica, talc and silica on Mr Graby’s table, trying hard to feel interested in them and to memorize their names and colours.

Mr Graby came in and caught him in this gratifying pose.

This interview, which loomed so thunderously on Francis’s horizon, was of course only a tiny incident in Mr Graby’s day, and if Francis had not been old Garden’s nephew, he would have been interviewed by one of the managers. Mr Graby did not examine prospective office boys. This act was a concession.

The words ‘office boys’ had been drumming a little irritably in his head for the last ten minutes, and when he came in and saw what looked like a juvenile lead bending over a tray of silica, he felt definitely cross.

‘Flashy,’ was the word which darted across the sensible, decent, rather hard mind which lived behind Mr Graby’s red face. It had come from Hull twenty-five years ago; and it still mistrusted flash.

‘Good morning. You’re Mr Garden’s nephew, aren’t you? Sorry to have kept you waiting. I’ve been expecting you, though, for the last week,’ said Mr Graby, brushing past Francis and sitting down at his desk.

Francis flew upright like a cobra, every nerve eager to impress, and said much too easily and eagerly, ‘It doesn’t matter a bit, sir. I’m awfully sorry not to have been down before. I was waiting for my new suit to be ready.’

And he glanced proudly down at himself. Surely, he thought, anyone must be impressed by the waisted elegance, the superb cling and subtle width of his new suit.

‘H’m,’ said Mr Graby. He looked at Francis’s very pale, eager, rather arrogant face, and the words ‘stook-oop’ joined ‘flashy’ in his mind.

‘How old are you?’

‘Sixteen and a half, sir.’

‘Just left school, I suppose? What school were you at?’

‘Northgate, sir.’

‘Well … you’ll have to do up parcels, sort the post in the Typing Department, stamp letters, and go down to the wharf every few days to fetch samples, and fill the inkpots and all the rest of it. Mr Faraday will tell you. Eight o’clock till six, weekdays, eight till one on Saturdays.’