How it opens
You were eighteen, an assistant master at the Whortley grammar school, and entirely resolved upon greatness.
Your salary was sixty pounds a year, your lodgings were clean, and your future was arranged in columns.
I am fencing the hours. It is a system. It is a very great system.
Does your system have a walk in it, of a Sunday, before chapel?
Choose
Formally, with a handshake, like two counties signing a treaty.
Say everything that can be said at a gate in a small town before chapel.
Arrange the terms, weekly letters, shorthand, everything, and postpone goodbye by arithmetic.