The "temporary insanity" of the coroner's court is most times a vile hypocrisy, invented to soothe a Christian conscience.
So long as he found enough work to do, his spirits were light.

He had a normal contempt for the temperament that is known as artistic, despised the variability of mood, ridiculed its April uncertainty.
This is the man who hews his way through Life, making no wide passage perhaps, no definite pathway for the thousands who are looking for the broad and simple track; but cuts down, lops off, with the sheer strength of dogged determination, the hundred obstacles that beset his progress.
When the clock at the Law Courts was striking the half-hour after twelve, he came up out of that depth of journalism which lies like a hidden world below the level of Fleet Street and made his way along towards the Strand.

There was a definite intention in his movements.
He walked quickly; turned up without hesitation into Southampton Street, and again into King Street.

There the speed of his steps lessened and, walking past the premises of Bonsfield & Co., he kept his eyes in the direction of the window at which he had first seen Sally Bishop at work.
She was there, her fingers more lively now than when he had seen them before, in their eternal dance upon the untiring keys.

In the lingering glance he took at her as he walked slowly by, there was much that was curiosity, but a greater interest.