saw a couple of jolly fine girls, handsome, stylish, independent of
carriage, swinging freely along and intimately talking with that mien
of experience and broad-mindedness which some girls manage to wear in
the streets. One of them in particular appealed to him. He thought how
different they were from Christine. He had dreamt of just such girls
as they were, and yet now Christine filled the whole of his mind.

"You can't foresee," he thought.

He dipped down into the extraordinary rectangle of St. James's, where
he was utterly at home. A strange architecture, parsimoniously plain
on the outside, indeed carrying the Oriental scorn for merely external
effect to a point only reachable by a race at once hypocritical and
madly proud. The shabby plainness of Wren's church well typified all
the parochial parsimony. The despairing architect had been so pinched
by his employers in the matter of ornament that on the whole of the
northern facade there was only one of his favourite cherub's heads!
What a parish!

It was a parish of flat brick walls and brass door-knobs and brass
plates. And the first commandment was to polish every brass door-knob
and every brass plate every morning. What happened in the way of
disfigurement by polishing paste to the surrounding brick or wood had
no importance. The conventions of the parish had no eye save for brass
door-knobs and brass plates, which were maintained daily in effulgence
by a vast early-rising population. Recruiting offices, casualty lists,
the rumour of peril and of glory, could do nothing to diminish the
high urgency of the polishing of those brass door-knobs and those
brass plates.