ling me that this town
hall had been started. I never expected to live to see it finished--"

Delighted guffaws, uproarious laughter, explosions of mirth, interrupted
this witty reference to the delays in construction. The speaker smiled
at ease. His eyes glinted. He knew his audience, held it consummately,
and went on.

In the afternoon there was a conversazione, or reception, for the
lunchers and also for the outer fringe of the city's solid
respectability. The whole of the town hall from basement to roof was
open to view, and citizens of all ages wandered in it everywhere,
admiring it, quizzing it, and feeling proudly that it was theirs. George
too wandered about, feeling that it was his. He was slowly recovering
from the humiliation of the lunch. Much of the building pleased him
greatly; at the excellence of some effects and details he marvelled; the
entry into the large hall from the grand staircase was dramatic, just as
he had had intended it should be; the organ was being played, and word
went round that the acoustic (or acoostic) properties of the auditorium
were perfect, and unrivalled by any auditorium in the kingdom. On the
other hand, the crudity of certain other effects and details irritated
the creator, helping him to perceive how much he had learnt in ten
years; in ten years, for example, his ideas about mouldings had been
quite transformed. What chiefly satisfied him was the demonstration,
everywhere, that he had mastered his deep natural impatience of minutiae
--that instinct which often so violently resented the exacting
irksomeness of trifles in the realization of a splendid idea. At
intervals he met an acquaintance and talked, but nobody at all appeared
to comprehend that he alone was the creator of the mighty pile, and that
all the individuals present might be divided artistically into two
classes--himself in one class, the entire remainder in the other. And
nobody appeared to be inconvenienced by the sense of the height of his
achievement or of the splendour of his triumph that day. It is true that
the north hates to seem impressed, and will descend to any duplicity in
order not to seem impressed.

The Town Clerk's clerk came importantly up to him and asked:

"How many reserved seats would you like for the concert?"

A grand ballad concert, at which the most sentimental of contraltos,
helped by other first-class throats, was to minister wholesale to the
insatiable secret sentimentality of the