Page:The wheels of chance -- a bicycling idyll.djvu/25

Rh the mechanical duties in hand. The assistant is dreaming of the delicious time—only four hours off now—when he will resume the tale of his bruises and abrasions. The apprentice is nearer the long long thoughts of boyhood, and his imagination rides cap-à-pie through the chambers of his brain, seeking some knightly quest in honour of that Fair Lady, the last but one of the girl apprentices to the dress-making upstairs. He inclines rather to street fighting against revolutionaries—because then she could see him from the window.

Jerking them back to the present comes the puffy little shop–walker, with a paper in his hand. The apprentice becomes extremely active. The shop-walker eyes the goods in hand. “Hoopdriver,” he says, “how's that line of g-sez-x ginghams?”

Hoopdriver returns from an imaginary triumph over the uncertainties of dismounting. “They're going fairly well, sir. But the larger checks seem hanging.”

The shop-walker brings up parallel to the counter. “Any particular time when you want your holidays?” he asks.

Hoopdriver pulls at his skimpy moustache. “No—Don't want them too late, sir, of course.”

“How about this day week?”

Hoopdriver becomes rigidly meditative, gripping the corners of the gingham folds in his hands. His