But in this, I found, Mick was not vitally interested--both
were too deeply immoral for him to touch. For Mick was a worker. He
liked work. Vagrancy to him made no appeal. To "settle down" was his
one definite desire. But jobs refused to hold him, and the road gripped
him in spite of himself. So the problem presented itself to him in an
abstract way only; to me there was a real--but let that go.
Mick's respectability was uncanny. He could speculate on these things
as if they were matters affecting none of us there. In that fourpenny
doss-house he remained as aloof as a god, and in some vague way the
calmness of the man in face of this infringing realism for a time
repelled me.
We cleaned up my packet to the last shred and crumb, and I found a
couple of fag ends in my pocket. We smoked silently. Mick's manner
gradually affected me. We became somehow mentally detached from the
place in which we sat. We were in a corner of the room, at the end of
the longest table, and so incurious about the rest of the company that
neither of us knew whether there were two or twenty men there.
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