Trent,on leaving the hotel,turned for almost the first time in his life westwards.For years the narrow alleys,the thronged streets,the great buildings of the City had known him day by day,almost hour by hour.Its roar and clamour,the strife of tongues and keen measuring of wits had been the salt of his life.Steadily,sturdily,almost insolently,he had thrust his way through to the front ranks.In many respects those were singular and unusual elements which had gone to the making of his success.His had not been the victory of honied falsehoods,of suave deceit,of gentle but legalised robbery.He had been a hard worker,a daring speculator with nerves of iron,and courage which would have glorified a nobler cause.Nor had his been the methods of good fellowship,the sharing of "good turns,"the camaraderie of finance.
The men with whom he had had large dealings he had treated as enemies rather than friends,ever watching them covertly with close but unslackening vigilance.And now,for the present at any rate it was all over.There had come a pause in his life.His back was to the City and his face was set towards an unknown world.Half unconsciously he had undertaken a little voyage of exploration.
>From the Strand he crossed Trafalgar Square into Pall Mall,and up the Haymarket into Piccadilly.He was very soon aware that he had wandered into a world whose ways were not his ways and with whom he had no kinship.Yet he set himself sedulously to observe them,conscious that what he saw represented a very large side of life.
>From the first he was aware of a certain difference in himself and his ways.The careless glance of a lounger on the pavement of Pall Mall filled him with a sudden anger.The man was wearing gloves,an article of dress which Trent ignored,and smoking a cigarette,which he loathed.Trent was carelessly dressed in a tweed suit and red tie,his critic wore a silk hat and frock coat,patent-leather boots,and a dark tie of invisible pattern.Yet Trent knew that he was a type of that class which would look upon him as an outsider,and a black sheep,until he had bought his standing.They would expect him to conform to their type,to learn to speak their jargon,to think with their puny brains and to see with their short-sighted eyes.At the "Criterion"he turned in and had a drink,and,bolder for the wine which he had swallowed at a gulp,he told himself that he would do nothing of the sort.He would not alter a jot.They must take him as he was,or leave him.He suffered his thoughts to dwell for a moment upon his wealth,on the years which had gone to the winning of it,on a certain nameless day,the memory of which even now sent sometimes the blood running colder through his veins,on the weaker men who had gone under that he might prosper.Now that it was his,he wanted the best possible value for it;it was the natural desire of the man to be uppermost in the bargain.The delights of the world behind,it seemed to him that he had already drained.The crushing of his rivals,the homage of his less successful competitors,the grosser pleasures of wine,the music-halls,and the unlimited spending of money amongst people whom he despised had long since palled upon him.He had a keen,strong desire to escape once and for ever from his surroundings.
He lounged along,smoking a large cigar,keen-eyed and observant,laying up for himself a store of impressions,unconsciously irritated at every step by a sense of ostracism,of being in some indefinable manner without kinship and wholly apart from this world,in which it seemed natural now that he should find some place.He gazed at the great houses without respect or envy,at the men with a fierce contempt,at the women with a sore feeling that if by chance he should be brought into contact with any of them they would regard him as a sort of wild animal,to be hurnoured or avoided purely as a matter of self-interest.The very brightness and brilliancy of their toilettes,the rustling of their dresses,the trim elegance and daintiness which he was able to appreciate without being able to understand,only served to deepen his consciousness of the gulf which lay between him and them.They were of a world to which,even if he were permitted to enter it,he could not possibly belong.He returned such glances as fell upon him with fierce insolence;he was indeed somewhat of a strange figure in his ill-fitting and inappropriate clothes amongst a gathering of smart people.A lady looking at him through raised lorgnettes turned and whispered something with a smile to her companion -once before he had heard an audible titter from a little group of loiterers.He returned the glance with a lightning-like look of diabolical fierceness,and,turning round,stood upon the curbstone and called a hansom.
