For many, many days life seemed to stand still. There was dull routine, Sunday succeeded Sunday. Gradually gaiety crept once more into the house in Fern Square, but it seemed to Francis so remote--as remote as the woman upstairs, who complained and complained and yet could babble of fashion and the weather and money and the young men who came courting her daughters.
_By my troth, Cony, if there were a thousand boys, thou would'st spoil them all with taking their parts._ THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE.
AT the age of twenty-four Frederic was earning twenty-five shillings a week as a managing clerk in Mr. Starkey's office in Hanging Row. He was fairly punctual in the morning, having hired Minna to rout him out of bed at eight o'clock, and he would lounge through the morning until one o'clock when he would disappear for two hours for lunch and coffee and dominoes in a smoky cellar called the Mecca Café. In the afternoon he would work furiously from three to five so as to have something to show for his day, and in the evening he would come to life. A sort of swagger would come into his bearing and a pinkish tinge would come into his pale cheeks and a new light into his blue-green eyes. He had discovered that in winter his light tenor voice could be made to earn about thirty shillings a week, and together with a spotty-faced youth in his office who sang comic songs (with patter) he went up and down our town and district giving "I'll Sing Thee Songs of Araby" and "To Anthea" and "There is a Lady Passing By," and winning much applause which invariably went to his head and made him very drunk. He sang under an assumed name, and no one at home knew what he was doing except Minna, whom he bribed with cigarettes to hold her peace. (She used to lock herself in the bath-room and smoke them out of the window.) When occasionally his mother complained that he was never at home in the evening he used to say that he was rehearsing. At intervals he used to take part in private theatricals with the spotty-faced youth or other of his friends. The pieces generally given were the farces of Madison Morton, or _The Blind Beggars_, or some amateur musical play. There was a Gentlemen's Musical Society which had a little hall in Oswald Street in the centre of our town. Frederic and the spotty-faced youth were members, though the Society had fallen on evil days and its entertainments had become rather broad. For the most part they were smoking-concerts, not unlike the Caves of Harmony that used to be in London, but the air was purified occasionally by a Ladies' Night, when the lions roared as gently as any sucking dove, and gave innocuous theatrical entertainments to which the members brought their daughters. Frederic became a shining light in the performances, and the members' daughters fell in love with him and wrote him ridiculous letters of admiration, which he gulped down without blinking.