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The skilled trades had their unions, their fixed hours of labor, fixed rates of pay. The big men, the industrial managers, the men who stood out in the professions, they had their own orbit into which he could not come until he had made good. There were the two forces, the top and the bottom of the workaday world. And he was in between, like a fish out of water.
'Ah, but it isn't everybody who can isolate himself so utterly from the workaday world and live so completely in his own little paradise of art as you can, my dear fellow. Non omnia possumus omnes. You seem to be always up in the aesthetic clouds, with your own music automatically laid on, and no need of cherubim or seraphim to chant continually for your gratification.
Now and then silhouettes appeared upon the window-blinds, especially on the upper floors, for it was the dressing hour and the cares of the day were being thrown aside with the workaday garments. In one house, standing far back from the road, the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn. As I passed, I saw a man tossing up a delighted child in his arms, and the mother standing by. Ay de mi!
The atmosphere of precautions and recriminations, and in the midst a human body growing more vivid because it was in pain; the end of that body in Hilton churchyard; the survival of something that suggested hope, vivid in its turn against life's workaday cheerfulness; all these were lost to Helen, who only felt that a pleasant lady could now be pleasant no longer.
I did not write, but I pictured, and my waking dreams became so vivid that I was in a fair way to treat them as the only reality, and might have discarded the workaday world altogether. Luckily for me, my disposition was tractable and law-abiding.
At noon, however, its workaday aspect was on; it was no more than a lunching place. Chester and Kate found seats in a retired corner. She looked him over with cool mischief while she drew off her gloves and let one white hand, still creased in pink with the pressure of the seams, drop toward him on the table.
He was struck with the pride we feel when we are dressed for amusement and contemplate those in workaday garb; and in these sensations of pride he leaned forward, proud of his good looks, his shirt front, his shirt cuffs, his glazed shoes; he pleasured in the knowledge that many saw he was going to elegant company, to amusement.
Might was perhaps not right, but unless a man was both willing and able to fight for his rights in the workaday world that was opening up to him, he could never be very sure that his rights would be respected.
Only of late had he begun to analyze things for himself and it had been something of a shock to discover that a college education was just a beginning that beyond the campus of his alma mater spread a workaday world which scoffed at dead languages and went in for a living wage, which turned from isoceles triangles and algebraic conundrums to solve the essential problems of food and clothing and shingled roofs.
But, alas! for the prosaicness of this workaday world, they had to assume the attitudes of lawyer and client; and discourse of crime instead of love. The situation was a trifle ironical, and must have provoked the laughter of the gods. "Well?" asked Miss Vrain, getting to business as soon as Lucian was seated, "and what have you found out?" "A great deal likely to be of service to us. And you?"
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