"Bring the youngster with you."

Solomon Appleyard and Hezekiah Grindley had started life within a
few months of one another some five-and-thirty years before.
Likewise within a few hundred yards of one another, Solomon at his
father's bookselling and printing establishment on the east side of
the High Street of a small Yorkshire town; Hezekiah at his father's
grocery shop upon the west side, opposite. Both had married
farmers' daughters. Solomon's natural bent towards gaiety Fate had
corrected by directing his affections to a partner instinct with
Yorkshire shrewdness; and with shrewdness go other qualities that
make for success rather than for happiness. Hezekiah, had
circumstances been equal, might have been his friend's rival for
Janet's capable and saving hand, had not sweet-tempered, laughing
Annie Glossop--directed by Providence to her moral welfare, one
must presume--fallen in love with him. Between Jane's virtues and
Annie's three hundred golden sovereigns Hezekiah had not hesitated
a moment. Golden sovereigns were solid facts; wifely virtues, by a
serious-minded and strong-willed husband, could be instilled--at
all events, light-heartedness suppressed. The two men, Hezekiah
urged by his own ambition, Solomon by his wife's, had arrived in
London within a year of one another: Hezekiah to open a grocer's
shop in Kensington, which those who should have known assured him
was a hopeless neighbourhood. But Hezekiah had the instinct of the
money-maker. Solomon, after looking about him, had fixed upon the
roomy, substantial house in Nevill's Court as a promising
foundation for a printer's business.

That was ten years ago. The two friends, scorning delights, living
laborious days, had seen but little of one another. Light-hearted