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"Not this morning, though, as you suggest, for, indebted as I am to you, Dom Manuel, I am also a very busy bird. No, I have any number of orders that were put in months before yours, and I must follow system in my business, for you have no notion what elaborate and exact accounts are frequently required by the married men that receive invoices from me."
Old Stick-in-the-mud is a lot shrewder than we think. "'When I read the writing, he told me, 'I think he is all robbish, but then I ask myself, Who shall put robbish in my invoices? And then I read the writing again and once again, and then I see he is a message." "Stop, Dicky!" I cried, "of course, what an ass I am! Why Eichenholz...."
Nevertheless, he arrived at last in the dark, cheerless little private office that looked out upon a yard, and found Camusot seated gravely there; this was not Coralie's infatuated adorer, not the easy-natured, indolent, incredulous libertine whom he had known hitherto as Camusot, but a heavy father of a family, a merchant grown old in shrewd expedients of business and respectable virtues, wearing a magistrate's mask of judicial prudery; this Camusot was the cool, business-like head of the firm surrounded by clerks, green cardboard boxes, pigeonholes, invoices, and samples, and fortified by the presence of a wife and a plainly-dressed daughter.
Fortune, presenting a whale-like flank, was at his table going through invoices and making notes in a small black book which he carried always in a tail pocket of his jacket. "Can I speak to you a minute, Mr. Fortune?" Mr. Fortune entered a note in the small black book: "Twenty-eight, sixteen, four."
They advance money on the crops and take railway and steamship invoices as guarantees they are centres of information respecting everybody who resides and everything that goes on in the district and the province. I write with personal knowledge of their working, for I watched it at close quarters in the Volga district and the Caucasus with the assistance of an experienced bank manager.
"A week ago, I was earning twenty-eight shillings a week, checking invoices and copying letters an errand boy's work; pure, unadulterated drudgery, working in a wretched atmosphere, without much hope of advancement or anything else." "But even then you leave part of my question unanswered," she insisted. "You were not born to this sort of thing?"
Recollections of the items and values of his invoices, afflicting to Varney's commercial spirit, threaded his consciousness only when again safe in Charlestown. He reached that haven at last by the exercise of great good judgment.
The death of my father when I was little more than twelve months old made it necessary that I should receive only such an education as would qualify me to pursue some business in my native town of Birmingham; and in all probability I shoule at this moment be entering orders or making out invoices in that great emporium had I not at a very early age evinced an absorbing passion for reading, which the free access to a tolerably large library enabled me to indulge, until it had grown to be a confirmed habit of mind, which, when the attention of my friends was called to the subject, had become too strong to be broken through; and with the usual foolish family vanity they determined to indulge a taste so early and decidedly developed, in the expectation, I verily believe, of some day catching a reflected beam from the fame and glory which I was to win by my genius; for by that mystical name was the mere musty talent of a nelluo librorum called.
Even the postman delivered peaceful invoices to the consul with his side-arms and the air of bringing dispatches from the field of battle; and the consul saluted, and felt for a few moments the whole weight of his consular responsibility.
Daniel did his best to make himself useful. But in spite of himself he scrawled music notes on the invoices, roared strange melodies in lonely vaults, and let the contents of a whole keg of wine leak out, because in front of him, on the floor, lay the score of the English Suites.
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