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He drifted upstairs to his fellow-tradesmen, and stood for a time
staring into the littered street, with its pools of water and
extinguished gas lamps. His companions in misfortune resumed a
fragmentary disconnected conversation. They touched now on one aspect
of the disaster and now on another, and there were intervals of
silence. More or less empty cocoa cups were distributed over the
table, mantelshelf and piano, and in the middle of the table was a tin
of biscuits, into which Mr. Rumbold, sitting round-shoulderedly,
dipped ever and again in an absent-minded way, and munched like a
distant shooting of coals. It added to the solemnity of the affair
that nearly all of them were in their black Sunday clothes; little
Clamp was particularly impressive and dignified in a wide open frock
coat, a Gladstone-shaped paper collar, and a large white and blue tie.
They felt that they were in the presence of a great disaster, the sort
of disaster that gets into the papers, and is even illustrated by
blurred photographs of the crumbling ruins. In the presence of that
sort of disaster all honourable men are lugubrious and sententious.
And yet it is impossible to deny a certain element of elation. Not one
of those excellent men but was already realising that a great door had
opened, as it were, in the opaque fabric of destiny, that they were to
get their money again that had seemed sunken for ever beyond any hope
in the deeps of retail trade. Life was already in their imagination
rising like a Phoenix from the flames.
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