He gained surprisingly in the practical sciences in the course of those first weeks, as his father in the little room was forced to confess, yet at what an expenditure of spirit, none--not even himself--might estimate. And almost the first piece of vital knowledge that he acquired in regard to the relation of that profoundly surprising and deeply inscrutable enigma, William Jordan, Junior, to its own surroundings, was that William Jordan, Junior, had a total lack of the primary essential to a life in the great world out of doors. It was necessary to act, to do; and as he lay in his bed through the long watches of the night staining his pillow with a silent and bitter anguish, he had to make the confession to himself that the capacity for action was not his. Sometimes when left quite alone, his hands and limbs and thoughts would obey the dictates of his will; but at the behest of the cruelly critical and unsympathetic street-persons, by whom he was encompassed, he was unable to command his faculties. The simplest acts, the mere carrying of a book from one desk to another, the addressing of an envelope, the counting of a pile of letters, all such elementary duties as these frequently lay beyond his power. It was not that he did not strive to overcome his own contemptible shortcomings. Every hour he passed in the counting-house of Crumpett and Hawker he exerted his will to its fullest, yet the result only brought down an ampler meed of censure, ill-temper, stern reproaches, and what, as his knowledge increased and he came to understand it, hurt him the most cruelly, wounding satire upon him. After he had spent a fortnight at No. 24 Trafalgar Square, the long room with the clerks on their high stools, and the quiet, bald-headed gentleman at the low table in their midst, dominated his thoughts like a hideous dream. Sleeping and awake this dreadful place darkened his mind. He would lie all the night through living again all the tragic transactions of the past day, or foreshadowing in his intensely vivid imagination the doubtless more tragic transactions of the morrow. As a rule, about an hour before it was imperative he should rise from his bed if he were to be at No. 24 Trafalgar Square as the clock struck eight, he would be worn out by sheer fatigue, and would fall into a light, fitful doze. Then as the hour for rising came, he would shudder with horror, although his brain was still half-dazed with the pangs of weariness it could not satisfy, and he would creep with his too-sensitive limbs from the grateful warmth of the blankets into the bitter inclemency of a new and dreadful day.