KIPPS
dreams of a sensible, unassuming existence, of snugness, of not caring what people said and all the rest of it, to dust; it had reinstated, squarely and strongly again, the only proper conception of English social life. There was a character in the book who trifled with Art, who was addicted to reading French novels, who dressed in a loose, careless way, who was a sorrow to his dignified, silvery-haired, politico-religious mother, and met the admonitions of bishops with a front of brass. He treated a "nice girl," to whom they had got him engaged, badly; he married beneath him—some low thing or other. And sank. . . .
Kipps could not escape the application of the case. He was enabled to see how this sort of thing looked to decent people; he was enabled to gauge the measure of the penalties due. His mind went from that to the frozen marble of Coote's visage.
He deserved it!. . .
That day of remorse! Later it found him upon the site of his building operations and surveying the disorder of preparation in a mood near to despair, his mackintosh over his arm.
Hardly anyone was at work that day—no doubt the builders were having him in some obscure manner—and the whole place seemed a dismal and depressing litter. The builder's shed, black-lettered Wilkins, Builder, Hythe, looked like a stranded thing amidst a cast-up disorder of wheelbarrows and wheeling planks, and earth and sand and bricks. The foundations of the walls were trenches full of damp concrete, drying in patches; the rooms—it was incredible they could ever be rooms—were shaped out
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