"'There was no worth in the fashion; there was no wit in the
plan,'" murmured the Poet. The rooms were too small even for a
Deputy-Director-General, and he knew that not one of the
silk-stockinged, short-skirted, starling-voiced young women
with bare arms and regimental badges, who acted as secretaries to
Deputy-Director-Generals, would consent to walk up four flights
of creaking, uncarpeted stairs to the dusty sparrows' nest on the
housetop that was his home.

For a while he scented a vendetta, but--deleterious poetry apart--he
had injured no man, and the personnel of the Cabinet Committee was
as little known to him as his poetry to the Cabinet Committee. In
general, too, he was the object of a certain popularity and pitying
regard; the Millionaire sent him presents of superfluous game each
year, the Iron King invited him at short notice to make a fourteenth
at dinner and the Official Receiver unloaded six bottles of sample
port wine when the Poet succumbed to his annual bronchitis. Even
the notice of eviction was politely worded and regretful; it was
also uncompromising in spirit, and the Poet made his hurried way
to four house-agents. No sooner had he started his requirements
to be a bed-sitting-room (with use of bath) within the four-mile
radius than all four agents offered him a Tudor manor house in
Westmoreland; further, they refused to offer him anything else, but
on his own initiative he discovered a studio in Glebe Place and a
service-flat in Victoria Street.

"I saw in the paper that you'd been turned out," said the Millionaire
that night, when the Poet trudged home, footsore and fretful, to
find his chambers occupied by the Iron King, the Private Secretary,
the Lexicographer, the Military Attache and their friends. "What