From the top of the flight of stairs leading from the ground floor, George, waiting till it was over, witnessed the departure of his family for the afternoon promenade.  A prodigious affair!  The parlourmaid (a delightful creature who was, unfortunately, soon to make an excellent match above her station) amiably helped the nursemaid to get the perambulator down the steps.  The parlourmaid wore her immutable uniform, and the nursemaid wore her immutable uniform.  Various things had to be packed into the perambulator, and then little Lois had to be packed into it—­not because she could not walk, but because it was not desirable for her to arrive at the playground tired.  Nursey’s sunshade was undiscoverable, and little Laurencine’s little sunshade had to be retrieved from underneath little Lois in the depths of the perambulator.  Nursey’s book had fallen on the steps.  Then the tiny but elaborate perambulator of Laurencine’s doll had to go down the steps, and the doll had to be therein ensconced under Laurencine’s own direction, and Laurencine’s sunshade had to be opened, and Laurencine had to prove to the maids that she could hold the sunshade in one hand and push the doll’s perambulator with the other.  Finally, the procession of human beings and vehicles moved, munitioned, provisioned, like a caravan setting forth into the desert, the parlourmaid amiably waving adieux.

George thought:  “I support all that.  It all depends on me.  I have brought it all into existence.”  And his reflections embraced Lois upstairs, and the two colleagues of the parlourmaid in the kitchen, and the endless apparatus of the house, and the people at his office and the apparatus there, and the experiences that awaited him on the morrow, and all his responsibilities, and all his apprehensions for the future.  And he was amazed and dismayed by the burden which almost unwittingly he bore night and day.  But he felt too that it was rather fine.  He felt that he was in the midst of life.

As he was cranking his car, which he had left unattended at the kerb, Mrs. Buckingham Smith’s magnificent car driven by her magnificent chauffeur, swept in silence up to the door and sweetly stopped.  George’s car was a very little one, and he was his own chauffeur, and had to walk home from the garage when he had done with it.  The contemplation of Buck Smith’s career showed George that there are degrees of success.  Buck Smith received a thousand pounds for a portrait (in the French manner of painting)—­and refused commissions at that.  Buck Smith had a kind of palace in Melbury Road.  By the side of Buck Smith.  George was a struggling semi-failure.  Mrs. Buck Smith, the lady whom George had first glimpsed in the foyer of a theatre, was a superb Jewess whom Buck had enticed from the stage.  George did not like her because she was apt, in ecstasy, to froth at the mouth, and for other reasons; but she was one of his wife’s most intimate friends.  Lois, usually taciturn, would chatter with Adah for hours.