Gastamos todo el dinero que pudimos, y obtuvimos a cambio tan poco como la gente se dignó darnos.
Fuimos siempre más o menos desgraciados, y la mayoría de nuestros conocidos se hallaban en el mismo estado.
Existía entre nosotros la alegre ficción de que nos divertíamos constantemente, y la verdad esquelética de que jamás lo hacíamos.
Según mi mejor entender, nuestro caso, en este último aspecto, era bastante común.
Every morning, with an air ever new, Herbert went into the City to look about him.
I often paid him a visit in the dark backroom in which he consorted with an ink jar, a hat peg, a coal box, a string box, an almanac, a desk and stool, and a ruler; and I do not remember that I ever saw him do anything else but look about him.
If we all did what we undertake to do, as faithfully as Herbert did, we might live in a Republic of the Virtues. He had nothing else to do, poor fellow, except at a certain hour of every afternoon to “go to Lloyd’s”—in observance of a ceremony of seeing his principal, I think. He never did anything else in connection with Lloyd’s that I could find out, except come back again.
When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he positively must find an opening, he would go on ’Change at a busy time, and walk in and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance figure, among the assembled magnates.
“For,” says Herbert to me, coming home to dinner on one of those special occasions, “I find the truth to be, Handel, that an opening won’t come to one, but one must go to it—so I have been.”