To help--to help! That was the great thing.
He didn't care much for business, but he felt that, being Peter
Rolls's only son, it was his duty to care. He imagined father deeply
hurt at the indifference of his two children to that which had been
his life--hurt, but hiding the wound with proud reserve. So Peter
junior determined to sacrifice himself. He offered to go into the
shop, to begin at the bottom if father wished, and in learning all
there was to learn, gradually work up to a place where he could be a
staff to lean upon.
It was in the "library" that they had this talk--an immense and
appalling room, all very new oak panelling and very new, uniform sets
of volumes bound in red leather and gold, with crests and bookplates,
bleakly glittering behind glass doors. Peter senior tried to kill time
there, because a library seemed to his daughter the right background
for a father, and Peter junior, who had saved mother's poor old
furniture for his own rooms, found it singularly difficult to open his
heart between walls that smelled of money and newness. However, he did
his best to blunder out the offer of himself; while the chill gleam in
his father's eyes (so remarkably like that of the bookcase glass
doors) made him feel, as he went on, that he must have begun all
wrong.
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