Page:Harold Macgrath--The girl in his house.djvu/54

 Armitage, former clubman, hunter, and idler, and analytically tore him into so many fragments that he was presently in the same category as Humpty Dumpty after the fall. Bob Burlingham had hit the nail on the head; For years he had lolled on metaphorical sofa pillows, a well-meaning, inefficient, pleasure-loving idler. Set to it, he could not have made out a list of his properties from memory. Never having been a spendthrift in the Broadway sense, there had always been fat balances to draw against. Bordman had taken care of everything. Once in a great while Bordman had called him down to the office to sign some paper; but he had never gone there for any other reason. The pale, obsequious little man had always bored him.

Armitage nibbled his mustache as he went along. The whole emptiness of his life stretched out vividly in a kind of processional review. Social routine: a ride in the Park in the morning, tea somewhere in the afternoon, a dinner dance or the theater, and a rubber or two at the club, broken by fishing and hunting trips and weekends in the country. A grasshopper's life! An idle,