'The fact is,' said Desborough, 'that I am doing nothing.'

'A private fortune possibly?' inquired the other.

'Well, no,' replied Desborough, rather sulkily. 'The fact is that
I am waiting for something to turn up.'

'All in the same boat!' cried Somerset. 'And have you, too, one
hundred pounds?'

'Worse luck,' said Mr. Desborough.

'This is a very pathetic sight, Mr. Godall,' said Somerset: 'Three
futiles.'

'A character of this crowded age,' returned the salesman.

'Sir,' said Somerset, 'I deny that the age is crowded; I will admit
one fact, and one fact only: that I am futile, that he is futile,
and that we are all three as futile as the devil. What am I? I
have smattered law, smattered letters, smattered geography,
smattered mathematics; I have even a working knowledge of judicial
astrology; and here I stand, all London roaring by at the street's
end, as impotent as any baby. I have a prodigious contempt for my
maternal uncle; but without him, it is idle to deny it, I should
simply resolve into my elements like an unstable mixture. I begin
to perceive that it is necessary to know some one thing to the
bottom--were it only literature. And yet, sir, the man of the
world is a great feature of this age; he is possessed of an