More than two months later George came into the office in Russell Square an hour or so after his usual time.  He had been to South Kensington Museum to look up, for professional purposes, some scale drawings of architectural detail which were required for a restaurant then rising in Piccadilly under the direction of Lucas & Enwright.  In his room Mr. Everard Lucas was already seated.  Mr. Lucas was another articled pupil of the firm; being a remote cousin of the late senior partner, he had entered on special terms.  Although a year older than George he was less advanced, for whereas George had passed the Intermediate, Mr. Lucas had not.  But in manly beauty, in stylishness, in mature tact, and especially in persuasive charm, he could beat George.

“Hallo!” Lucas greeted.  “How do you feel?  Fit?”

“Fit?” said George enthusiastically “I feel so fit I could push in the side of a house.”

“What did I tell you?” said Lucas.

George rubbed his hand all over Lucas’s hair, and Lucas thereupon seized George’s other hand and twisted his arm, and a struggle followed.  In this way they would often lovingly salute each other of a morning.  Lucas had infected George with the craze for physical exercises as a remedy for all ills and indiscretions, including even late nights and excessive smoking.  The competition between them to excel in the quality of fitness was acute, and sometimes led to strange challenges.  After a little discussion about springing from the toes, Lucas now accused George’s toes of a lack of muscularity, and upon George denying the charge, he asserted that George could not hang from the mantelpiece by his toes.  They were both men of the world, capable of great heights of dignity, figures in an important business, aspirants to a supreme art and profession.  They were at that moment in a beautiful late-eighteenth-century house of a stately and renowned square, and in a room whose proportions and ornament admittedly might serve as an exemplar to the student; and not the least lovely feature of the room was the high carved mantelpiece.  The morning itself was historic, for it was the very morning upon which, President McKinley having expired, Theodore Roosevelt ascended the throne and inaugurated a new era.  Nevertheless, such was their peculiar time of life that George, a minute later, was as a fact hanging by his toes from the mantelpiece, while Lucas urged him to keep the blood out of his head.  George had stood on his hands on a box and lodged his toes on the mantelpiece, and then raised his hands—­and Lucas had softly pushed the box away.  George’s watch was dangling against his flushed cheek.

“Put that box back, you cuckoo!” George exploded chokingly.