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me."
The phrase 'bloomin' Dook' floated into his mind with a certain flavour
of comfort.
He lit a cigarette, and sat smoking and meditating. He did not even look
up when vehicles passed. It was perhaps ten minutes before he roused
himself. "What rot it is! What's the good of thinking such things," he
said. "I'm only a blessed draper's assistant." (To be exact, he did not
say blessed. The service of a shop may polish a man's exterior ways, but
the 'prentices' dormitory is an indifferent school for either manners
or morals.) He stood up and began wheeling his machine towards Esher. It
was going to be a beautiful day, and the hedges and trees and the open
country were all glorious to his town-tired eyes. But it was a little
different from the elation of his start.
"Look at the gentleman wizzer bicitle," said a nursemaid on the path
to a personage in a perambulator. That healed him a little. "'Gentleman
wizzer bicitle,'--'bloomin' Dook'--I can't look so very seedy," he said
to himself.
"I WONDER--I should just like to know--"
There was something very comforting in the track of HER pneumatic
running straight and steady along the road before him. It must be hers.
No other pneumatic had been along the road that morning. It was just
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