Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 7.pdf/227

 anything but to be a Hand. It's the way they do with draper's apprentices. If every swindler was locked up—well, you'd have nowhere to buy tape and cotton. It's all very well to bring up Burns and those chaps, but I'm not that make. Yet I'm not such muck that I might not have been better—with teaching. I wonder what the chaps who sneer and laugh at such as me would be if they'd been fooled about as I've been. At twenty-three—it's a long start."

He looked up with a wintry smile, a sadder and wiser Hoopdriver indeed than him of the glorious imaginings. "It's you done this," he said. "You're real. And it sets me thinking what I really am, and what I might have been. Suppose it was all different"

"Make it different."

"How?"

"Work. Stop playing at life. Face it like a man."

"Ah!" said Hoopdriver, glancing at her out of the corners of his eyes. "And even then"

"No! It's not much good. I'm beginning too late."

And there, in blankly thoughtful silence, that conversation ended.