You're lucky, my boy, as I always said you were." Paul looked at the picture of a wooden leg, adorned with elastic stockings and other appliances, that figured on Mr.Jordan's notepaper, and he felt alarmed.

He had not known that elastic stockings existed.
And he seemed to feel the business world, with its regulated system of values, and its impersonality, and he dreaded it.

It seemed monstrous also that a business could be run on wooden legs.
Mother and son set off together one Tuesday morning.

It was August and blazing hot.

Paul walked with something screwed up tight inside him.
He would have suffered much physical pain rather than this unreasonable suffering at being exposed to strangers, to be accepted or rejected.