The thing grew by degrees, from the first builder’s hoarding which Sam rented venturously for advertising space, to a comfortable little business that ran itself by its own momentum long after he tired of its comparative insignificance. With George, the start was all: he could always plod where Sam had led, and as Sam had time to set the ball rolling, and money enough to spoon-feed the infant business with capital, George kept the thing in being by careful, steady management. He hadn’t boasted when he told Anne he was steady. Of course, Sam was impatient and deplored his active partner’s inactivity. He grew tired of the gradual increase, but, all the same, the business was unquestionably successful, and he relished hugely his sense of being the power behind the throne, if only behind a small, conservative, so lamentably unambitious throne. Sam also was among the king makers. The other, greater sequel to his reaction led to more pyrotechnical results, and eventually to Sam’s launch on his career. Nothing happened at first, and indeed for so long that he was feeling himself between the devil of the estate office and the deep sea of George’s persistent carefulness. The Chappie Bill-Posting Company was good enough for George, but not for Sam: there were too many com petitors with too great resources, while the estate office routine bored him, and opportunities for piratical enterprise did not recur. He felt, at twenty-four years of age, and at two pounds ten a week, that he was growing old in service, he who was not meant to serve but to be served. But then--desolating thought--was he meant to be served? Had he lost, or was he, at any rate, not losing the accent of speech and mind of those who are served? He knew that his accent had touched pitch and been defiled: those bawdy stories of his were told in the tongue of his hearers, and there had been clients lately who had spoken to him, when inspecting property, as if he were a clerk, and not a pleasant, gentlemanly youth of obvious superiority to his present, no doubt temporary, job. He had a sudden fear that the job might not be temporary after all, and there followed a time when he was wholly bent on self-improvement, when he abjured the narrow way of professional text-books and read that he might become well-read, that he might bandy allusions with those old school-fellows of his who had gone to Universities, that he might, if he could not hope to shine, at least be not outshone. It wasn’t _pour le bon motif_, and he did not even pretend to like the greater part of what he read. He crammed against the grain, and a growing row of the “World’s Classics” figured on his shelf as trophies of his perseverance. Industriously he rubbed away the rust which had accumulated on his mind since it took its not very brilliant polish of the Grammar School. He took down the dust-stained Gibbon he had won for reading, and ploughed heroically through it.