The office-boy went out and in a moment returned.

“Will you come this way?”

Philip followed him across the passage and was shown into a room, small and barely furnished, in which a little, thin man was standing with his back to the fireplace.  He was much below the middle height, but his large head, which seemed to hang loosely on his body, gave him an odd ungainliness.  His features were wide and flattened, and he had prominent, pale eyes; his thin hair was sandy; he wore whiskers that grew unevenly on his face, and in places where you would have expected the hair to grow thickly there was no hair at all.  His skin was pasty and yellow.  He held out his hand to Philip, and when he smiled showed badly decayed teeth.  He spoke with a patronising and at the same time a timid air, as though he sought to assume an importance which he did not feel.  He said he hoped Philip would like the work; there was a good deal of drudgery about it, but when you got used to it, it was interesting; and one made money, that was the chief thing, wasn’t it?  He laughed with his odd mixture of superiority and shyness.

“Mr. Carter will be here presently,” he said.  “He’s a little late on Monday mornings sometimes.  I’ll call you when he comes.  In the meantime I must give you something to do.  Do you know anything about book-keeping or accounts?”

“I’m afraid not,” answered Philip.

“I didn’t suppose you would.  They don’t teach you things at school that are much use in business, I’m afraid.”  He considered for a moment.  “I think I can find you something to do.”

He went into the next room and after a little while came out with a large cardboard box.  It contained a vast number of letters in great disorder, and he told Philip to sort them out and arrange them alphabetically according to the names of the writers.

“I’ll take you to the room in which the articled clerk generally sits.  There’s a very nice fellow in it.  His name is Watson.  He’s a son of Watson, Crag, and Thompson—­you know—­the brewers.  He’s spending a year with us to learn business.”

Mr. Goodworthy led Philip through the dingy office, where now six or eight clerks were working, into a narrow room behind.  It had been made into a separate apartment by a glass partition, and here they found Watson sitting back in a chair, reading The Sportsman.  He was a large, stout young man, elegantly dressed, and he looked up as Mr. Goodworthy entered.  He asserted his position by calling the managing clerk Goodworthy.  The managing clerk objected to the familiarity, and pointedly called him Mr. Watson, but Watson, instead of seeing that it was a rebuke, accepted the title as a tribute to his gentlemanliness.

“I see they’ve scratched Rigoletto,” he said to Philip, as soon as they were left alone.

“Have they?” said Philip, who knew nothing about horse-racing.