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He tried at times to work up enthusiasm for the various avenues to
well-being his discussion with Johnson opened. But they remained
disheartening prospects. He imagined himself wonderfully smartened up,
acquiring style and value in a London shop, but the picture was stiff
and unconvincing. He tried to rouse himself to enthusiasm by the idea
of his property increasing by leaps and bounds, by twenty pounds a
year or so, let us say, each year, in a well-placed little shop, the
corner shop Johnson favoured. There was a certain picturesque interest
in imagining cut-throat economies, but his heart told him there would
be little in practising them.
And then it happened to Mr. Polly that real Romance came out of
dreamland into life, and intoxicated and gladdened him with sweetly
beautiful suggestions--and left him. She came and left him as that
dear lady leaves so many of us, alas! not sparing him one jot or one
tittle of the hollowness of her retreating aspect.
It was all the more to Mr. Polly's taste that the thing should happen
as things happen in books.
In a resolute attempt not to get to Stamton that day, he had turned
due southward from Easewood towards a country where the abundance of
bracken jungles, lady's smock, stitchwork, bluebells and grassy
stretches by the wayside under shady trees does much to compensate the
lighter type of mind for the absence of promising "openings." He
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