it is a vast frame of mind, that one may not like, but that one has not any valid ethical reason for condemning.
But the pity for X., as for so many other amiable and gallant young men, is that even in this modern market, the essentially old-fashioned must be to be found at the bottom of the sack. What work we do must still in one way or another be good in the sense of being attractive. You must still lay a good coin of some realm or other on the green cloth.
I know, for instance, another young man not so dilettante—neither indeed so charming nor so amiable as X—but almost more romantic. I will call him P. He had inherited a business of a specially old-established, a specially trustworthy, a specially eminent kind—one of those houses as reliable and as "placed", as is Childs' in the banking, or Twinings' in the tea trade. When P. came into it, it was already beginning to feel the touch of competition from Stores. It had relied upon old-fashioned "good" customers; it had never advertised.
P. not only advertised generally and lavishly, but he put on the market cheap and attractively packed "specialities". He tried in fact to corner London's collar studs. What his business lost immediately in caste, he tried to make up at home. He devoted his leisure time to a species of scientific investigation connected with his trade, which along with Napoleons of Specialities, has room for disinterested and abstruse
mere work enough, sober and uninviting, to keep men in the country districts all over Europe.
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