Rather more than a week later, Edwin had so far entered into the life of his father’s business that he could fully¹ share the excitement caused by an impending² solemnity in the printing office. He was somewhat pleased with himself, and especially with his seriousness. The memory of school was slipping away from him in the most extraordinary manner. His only school-friend, Charlie Orgreave, had departed, with all the multitudinous Orgreaves, for a month in Wales. He might have written to the Sunday; the Sunday might have written to him: but the idea of writing did not occur to either of them; they were both still sufficiently⁴ childlike to accept with fatalism all the consequences of parental⁵ caprice. Orgreave senior had taken his family to Wales; the boys were thus separated, and there was an end of it. Edwin regretted this, because Orgreave senior happened to be a very successful architect, and hence there were possibilities of getting into an architectural atmosphere. He had never been inside the home of the Sunday, nor the Sunday in his—a schoolboy friendship can flourish in perfect independence of home—but he nervously⁶ hoped that on the return of the Orgreave regiment⁷ from Wales, something favourable⁸ to his ambitions—he knew not what—would come to pass. In the meantime he was conscientiously⁹ doing his best to acquire a business training, as his father had suggested. He gave himself with an enthusiasm almost religious to the study of business methods. All the force of his resolve to perfect himself went for the moment into this immediate¹⁰ enterprise, and he was sorry that business methods were not more complex, mysterious, and original than they seemed to be: he was also sorry that his father did not show a greater interest in his industry and progress.

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