t the German forces amounted in all to
the equivalent of over three hundred divisions; he had been reliably
told that the British forces in France amounted to three divisions and
some cavalry. It was most absurd; but his mysticism survived the
absurdity, so richly was it nourished by news from the strange,
inartistic colonies, where architecture was not understood. Revelation
came to George that the British Empire, which he had always suspected to
be an invention of those intolerable persons the Imperialists, was after
all something more than a crude pink smear across the map of the world.

Withal he was acutely dejected as he left his office to go to the club.

II

Sir Isaac was sitting quite alone in the large smoking-room of the
Artists in Albemarle Street--a beautiful apartment terribly disfigured
by its pictures, which had been procured from fashionable members in the
fashionable taste of twenty years earlier, and were crying aloud for
some one brave enough to put them out of their misery. No interpretation
of the word 'artist' could by any ingenuity be stretched to include Sir
Isaac. Nevertheless he belonged to the club, and so did a number of
other men in like case. The difference between Sir Isaac and the rest
was that Sir Isaac did actually buy pictures, though seldom from
fashionable painters.

He was a personage of about forty-five years, with a rather prominent
belly, but not otherwise stout; a dark man; plenty of stiff black hair
(except for one small central bald patch); a rank moustache, and a
clean-shaven chin apparently woaded in the manner of the ancient
Britons; elegantly and yet severely dressed--braided morning-coat,
striped trousers, small, skin-fitting boots, a black flowered-silk
necktie. As soon as you drew near him you became aware of his
respiratory processes; you were bound to notice continually that without
ceasing he carried on the elemental business of existence. Hair sprouted
from his nose, and the nose was enormous; it led at a pronounced slope
to his high forehead, which went on upwards at exactly the same angle
and was lost in his hair. If the chin had weakly receded, as it often
does in this type, Sir Isaac would have had a face like a spear-head,
like a ram of which the sharp point was the top of his nose; but Sir
Isaac's chin was square, and the wall of it perpendicular.

His expression was usually inquisitive, dissatisfied, and
disdainful--the effect being produced by a sl