.."
* * * * *
David decided at any rate for the present to accept the addition to
his capital--you can perhaps push principle _too_ far; or, once you
plunge into affairs, you cease to be quite so high-souled. At any
rate nothing in David's middle-class mind was so horrible as penury
and the impotence that comes with it. How many months or years would
lie ahead of him before fees could be gained and a professional
income be earned? Besides he wanted to take Bertie Adams into his
service as a Clerk. A barrister must have a clerk, and David in his
peculiar circumstances could only engage one acquainted more or
less with his secret.
So Bertie Adams fulfilled the ambition he had cherished for three
years--he felt all along it was coming true. And when David was
called to the Bar--which he was with all the stately ceremonial of a
Call night at the Inner Temple in the Easter term of 1905, more
elbow room was acquired at Fig Tree Court, and Bertie Adams was
installed there as clerk to Mr. David Vavasour Williams, who had
residential chambers on the third floor, and a fair-sized Office and
small private room on the second floor. Bertie's mother had "washed"
for both Honoria and Vivie in their respective dwellings for years,
and for David after he came to live at Fig Tree Court. A substantial
douceur to the "housekeeper" had facilitated this, for in the part
of the Temple where lies Fig Tree Court the residents do not call
their ministrants "laundresses," but "housekeepers.
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