get right hold of that, and then have tea in the very room that
Chaucer did, and hustle to get that four-eighteen train back to
London."

He would go over these precious phrases, finding them full of an
indescribable flavour. "Just the Broad Elemental Canterbury
praposition," he would repeat....

He would try to imagine Parsons confronted with Americans. For his own
part he knew himself to be altogether inadequate....

Canterbury was the most congenial situation Mr. Polly ever found
during these wander years, albeit a very desert so far as
companionship went.


III

It was after Canterbury that the universe became really disagreeable
to Mr. Polly. It was brought home to him, not so much vividly as with
a harsh and ungainly insistence, that he was a failure in his trade.
It was not the trade he ought to have chosen, though what trade he
ought to have chosen was by no means clear.

He made great but irregular efforts and produced a forced smartness
that, like a cheap dye, refused to stand sunshine. He acquired a sort
of parsimony also, in which acquisition he was helped by one or two
phases of absolute impecuniosity. But he was hopeless in competition
against the naturally gifted, the born hustlers, the young men who
meant to get on.