This time I tried to catch his eye, but he never gave me a chance,
and when he handed me a dish I could only be careful to thank him
audibly. Indeed I partook of two entrees of which I had my doubts,
subsequently converted into certainties, in order not to snub him.
He looked well enough in health, but much older, and wore in an
exceptionally marked degree the glazed and expressionless mask of
the British domestic de race. I saw with dismay that if I hadn't
known him I should have taken him, on the showing of his
countenance, for an extravagant illustration of irresponsive
servile gloom. I said to myself that he had become a reactionary,
gone over to the Philistines, thrown himself into religion, the
religion of his "place," like a foreign lady sur le retour. I
divined moreover that he was only engaged for the evening--he had
become a mere waiter, had joined the band of the white-waistcoated
who "go out." There was something pathetic in this fact--it was a
terrible vulgarisation of Brooksmith. It was the mercenary prose
of butlerhood; he had given up the struggle for the poetry. If
reciprocity was what he had missed where was the reciprocity now?
Only in the bottoms of the wine-glasses and the five shillings--or
whatever they get--clapped into his hand by the permanent man.
However, I supposed he had taken up a precarious branch of his
profession because it after all sent him less downstairs. His
relations with London society were more superficial, but they were
of course more various. As I went away on this occasion I looked
out for him eagerly among the four or five attendants whose
perpendicular persons, fluting the walls of London passages, are
supposed to lubricate the process of departure; but he was not on
duty. I asked one of the others if he were not in the house, and
received the prompt answer: "Just left, sir. Anything I can do
for you, sir?" I wanted to say "Please give him my kind regards";