Each man can
wear his own parasites, but it's a task for him to stand
another man's. I shook your Lord Plowden off, when the
chance came."
"THAT'S all right," Thorpe assured him, easily. "I never
told you that he was any good. I merely felt like giving
him a leg up--because really at the start he was of use
to me. I did owe him something....It was at his house
that I met my wife."
"Aye," said Semple, with dispassionate brevity.
CHAPTER XXIV
WHEN he had parted with Semple, at a corner where
the busy broker, who had walked out with him,
obviously fidgeted to get away, Thorpe could think
of no one else in the City whom he desired to see.
A call upon his bankers would, he knew, be made an occasion
of extremely pleasant courtesy by those affable people,
but upon reflection it seemed scarcely worth the trouble.
He was in a mood for indolent sauntering, and he made the long
stretch of the Holborn thoroughfare in a leisurely fashion,
turning off when the whim seized him into odd courts and
alley-ways to see what they were like. After luncheon,
he continued his ramble, passing at last from St. Giles,
through avenues which had not existed in the London
of his boyhood, to the neighbourhood of the Dials.
Here also the landmarks seemed all changed, but there
was still enough ostentatious squalor and disorder
to identify the district.
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