For in certain less socialistic moods, John insisted on regarding bookbinding, in any and all of its branches, not as a trade, but as an art.

—Two —

Brother and Sister

At school Richard had been friendly with a boy, gentle of nature and not much older than himself, by the name of Arthur Manson. But he had suddenly disappeared from the school, and for years Richard had not seen him. One evening as he was carrying home a book, he met this fellow looking worn and sad. He would have avoided Richard, but he stopped him, and presently the old friendship was again struck.

Arthur had had to leave school, he told Richard, because of the sudden cessation, from what cause he did not know, of a certain annuity his mother had till then enjoyed. This made it suddenly imperative that he earn his own living and contribute to her support. His sister was at work with a dressmaker, but as yet earning next to nothing. His mother was a lady, he said, and had never worked. He was himself employed in a bank in the city with the meager salary of forty pounds a year. He told him where they lived, and Richard promised to call upon him the next Sunday.

Arthur’s mother lived in a little house of two floors. She was a handsome middle-aged woman—not so old, Richard somehow imagined, as she looked. She was stout and florid and seemed to Richard to have the carriage of a lady but not the speech equal to her manners. She was polite to him, but apparently not overly interested in her son’s friend. Several times, however, he found her gazing at him with an expression that puzzled him. But he had a conscience too clear to be troubled by any scrutiny.

All evening Arthur’s face wore the same look of depression, and Richard wondered what could be the matter. He learned afterward that the mother was self-indulgent and took little care to make the money go as far as it could, with the result that Arthur had to toil away from morning to night at labour he hardly enjoyed, never able to have the least recreation, and too tired when he came home to understand any book he attempted to read. All the while his mother spent rather too freely the money he brought her. Richard learned also that Arthur possessed no overcoat and went to the city, even in the winter, with but scanty provisions. But it was not Arthur who told him this.

His sister Alice was a graceful little creature, with the same sad look her brother had, but not the same depression. She seemed more delicate and less capable of labour. Yet her hours were longer than his and her confinement even greater. Alice had to sit the whole day with her needle, while Arthur was occasionally sent out to collect money. But Alice’s mistress was a kind-hearted woman who was not so fashionable as to have become indifferent to the well-being of her workwomen. She even paid a crippled girl a trifle for reading aloud to them while they worked. So even if it was harder, life was not so uninteresting to Alice as to Arthur, and perhaps for that reason she seemed to have more vitality. Like her mother she had a quantity of hair, as dark as hers but finer, dark eyes not without meaning, irregular but pleasing and delicate features, and an unusually white rather than pale complexion with a sort of sallow glow under the diaphanous skin. There was not a little piquancy in the expression of her countenance, and Richard felt it strangely attractive.