e was
sent into a fresh room to meet a fresh examiner. There he stood in the
room alone with his designs for a small provincial town hall--a
key-plan, several one-eighth scale-plans, a piece of half-inch detail,
and two rough perspective sketches which he knew were brilliant. The
room was hot; through the open window came the distant sound of the
traffic of Regent Street. The strange melancholy of a city in summer
floated towards him from the outside and reinforced his own.

The examiner, who had been snatching tea, entered briskly and sternly.
He was a small, dapper, fair man of about fifty, with wonderfully tended
finger-nails. George despised him because Mr. Enwright despised him, but
he had met him once in the way of the firm's business and found him
urbane.

"Good afternoon," said George politely.

The examiner replied, trotting along the length of the desk with quick,
short steps:

"Now about this work of yours. I've looked at it with some care----" His
speech was like his demeanour and his finger-nails.

"Boor!" thought George. But he could not actively resent the slight. He
glanced round at the walls; he was in a prison. He was at the mercy of a
tyrant invested with omnipotence.

The little tyrant, however, was superficially affable. Only now and then
in his prim, courteous voice was there a hint of hostility and cruelty.
He put a number of questions, the answers to which had to be George's
justification. He said "H'm!" and "Ah!" and "Really?" He came to the
matter of spouting.

"Now, I object to hopper-heads," he said. "I regard them as unhygienic."

And he looked coldly at George with eyebrows lifted. George returned the
gaze.

"I know you do, sir," George replied.

Indeed it was notorious that hopper-heads to vertical spouting were a
special antipathy of the examiner's; he was a famous faddist. But the
reply was a mistake. The examiner, secure in his attributes, ignored the
sally. A little later, taking up the general plan of the town hall, he
said:

"The fact is, I do--not--care for this kind of thing. The whole
tendency----"

"Excuse me, sir," George interrupted, with conscious and elaborate
respectfulness. "But surely the question isn't one of personal
preferences. Is the design good or is it bad?"

"Well, I call it bad," said the examiner, showing testiness. The
examiner too could be impulsive, was indeed apt to be short-tempered.
The next instant he seized one of the brilliant perspecti