nly provincial town, large and picturesque certainly, but with
small sense of form or dignity. He had decided that his town hall would
stand quite unique in the town. But soon the city had imposed itself
upon him and taught him the rudiments of humility. It contained an
immense quantity of interesting architecture of various periods, which
could not be appreciated at a glance. It was a hoary place. It went back
to the Romans and further. Its fragmentary walls had survived through
seven centuries, its cathedral through six, its chief churches through
five. It had the most perfect Norman keep within two hundred miles. It
had ancient halls, mansions, towers, markets, and jail. And to these the
Victorian-Edwardian age had added museums, law courts, theatres; such
astonishing modernities as swimming-baths, power-houses, joint-stock
banks, lending libraries, and art schools; and whole monumental streets
and squares from the designs of a native architect without whose
respectable name no history of British architecture could be called
complete. George's town hall was the largest building in the city; but
it did not dominate the city nor dwarf it; the city easily digested it.
Arriving in the city by train the traveller, if he knew where to look,
could just distinguish a bit of the town hall tower, amid masses of
granite and brick: which glimpse symbolized the relation between the
city and the town hall and had its due effect on the Midland conceit of
George.

But what impressed George more than the stout, physical aspects of the
city was the sense of its huge, adventurous, corporate life, continuous
from century to century. It had known terrible battles, obstinate
sieges, famines, cholera, a general conflagration, and, in the twentieth
century, strikes that possibly were worse than pestilence. It had
fiercely survived them all. It was a city passionate and highly
vitalized. George had soon begun to be familiar with its organic
existence from the inside. The amazing delays in the construction of the
town hall were characteristic of the city, originating as they did not
from sloth or indecision but from the obduracy of the human will. At the
start a sensational municipal election had put the whole project on the
shelf for two years, and George had received a compensatory one per cent
on the estimated cost according to contract, and had abandoned his hope.
But the pertinacity of Mr. Soulter, first Councillor, then Alderman,
then M