“If you look like that, Shuttleworth, I shall cry.”

On another occasion Shuttleworth said: 

“We are throwing money away on advertisements.  The concern can’t stand it.”

Sypher turned, blue pencil in hand, from the wall where draft proofs of advertisements were pinned for his correction and master’s touch.  This was a part of the business that he loved.  It appealed to the flamboyant in his nature.  It particularly pleased him to see omnibuses pass by bearing the famous “Sypher’s Cure,” an enlargement of his own handwriting, in streaming letters of blood.

“We’re going to double them,” said he; and his air was that of the racing Mississippi captains of old days who in response to the expostulation of their engineers sent a little nigger boy to sit on the safety-valve.

The dismal manager turned up his eyes to heaven with the air of the family steward in Hogarth’s “Mariage a la Mode.”  He had not his chief’s Napoleonic mind; but he had a wife and a large family.  Clem Sypher also thought of that—­not only of Shuttleworth’s wife and family, but also of the wives and families of the many men in his employ.  It kept him awake at nights.

In the soothing air of Nunsmere, however, he slept, in long dead stretches, as a tired man sleeps, in spite of trains which screeched past the bottom of his lawn.  Their furious unrest enhanced the peace of village things.  He began to love the little backwater of the earth whose stillness calmed the fever of life.  As soon as he stepped out on to the platform at Ripstead a cool hand seemed to touch his forehead, and charm away the cares that made his temples throb.  At Nunsmere he gave himself up to the simplicities of the place.  He took to strolling, like Septimus, about the common and made friends with the lame donkey.  On Sunday mornings he went to church.  He had first found himself there out of curiosity, for, though not an irreligious man, he was not given to pious practices; but afterwards he had gone on account of the restfulness of the rural service.  His mind essentially reverend took it very seriously, just as it took seriously the works of a great poet which he could not understand or any alien form of human aspiration; even the parish notices and the publication of banns he received with earnest attention.  His intensity of interest as he listened to the sermon sometimes flattered the mild vicar, and at other times—­when thinness of argument pricked his conscience—­alarmed him considerably.  But Sypher would not have dared enter into theological disputation.  He took the sermon as he took the hymns, in which he joined lustily.  Cousin Jane, whom he invariably met with Mrs. Oldrieve after the service and escorted home, had no such scruples.  She tore the vicar’s theology into fragments and scattered them behind her as she walked, like a hare in a paper chase.

Said the Literary Man from London, who had strolled with them on one of these occasions: