528 ANGEL PAVEMENT

now. She simply did not interest him.

What did interest him, however, was the figure he cut
himself, and that was what he saw with such terrible
clearness. As he sat drooping on the bed, pulling away
mechanically at the last inch of the cigarette, he put him-
self through a pitiless cross-examination. How could he
ever have thought that he could make a girl like Lena
fall in love with him, a girl who was pretty, who could
meet all kinds of fellows, who had lived in places like
Paris, who had a father with money? The very thought
of Mr. Golspie crushed the last grains of self-respect in
him. What had he, Harold Turgis, been fancying him-
self for? What was he? What could he do? What had
he got? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Only a silly face,
with a big useless nose and a trembling mouth and eyes
that began to water almost if anybody looked hard at
them. He threw the stump of his cigarette at the dirty
saucer in front of the gas-fire, missed it, and had to go
down painfully on his knees and retrieve the glowing
end.

He returned to the bed and curled up on it, his eyes
fixed on some photographs, cut out of a film weekly,
pinned up on the opposite wall; but he did not see the
photographs, for he was staring through them, through
the wall, into the future, a vague darkness, in which he,
a small lonely figure, moved obscurely. His job was
gone. He had finished with Twigg and Dersingham
and Angel Pavement. Perhaps they might have given
him a rise soon; he might have had Smeeth's job and
seven or eight pounds a week before long, a proper home
and carpets and arm-chairs and a big wireless set of his
own; and now it might be a long time before he got a
job as good as the one he had just lost. What could he