of the genius of George Cannon?  Now he remembered that Sir Isaac Davids, the patron of all the arts and the influencer of commissions, had said that he would probably but not certainly be at the club that afternoon, and he argued that in any event half an hour sooner or later would not make or mar the business.  Indeed, he went further, and persuaded himself that between that moment and dinner he had nothing to do except sign a few routine letters at the office.  Still, it was just as well that Lois should remain in delusion as to his being seriously pressed for time.

As he curved, slackening and accelerating, with the perfect assurance of long habit, through the swift, intricate, towering motor traffic of Fulham Road, it was inevitable that he should recall the days, eleven years ago, when through a sedate traffic of trotting horses enlivened with a few motors and motor-buses, he used to run down on his motor-cycle to visit Marguerite.  It was inevitable that he should think upon what had happened to him in the meantime.  His body felt, honestly, no older.  The shoulders had broadened, the moustache was fiercer, there were semicircular furrows under the eyes; but he was as slim and agile as ever, and did his morning exercises as regularly as he took his bath.  More, he was still, somehow, the youthful prodigy who had won the biggest competition of modern years while almost an infant.  He was still known as such, regarded as such, greeted as such, referred to as such at intervals in the Press.  His fame in his own world seemed not to have deteriorated.  But disappointment had slowly, imperceptibly, eaten into him.  He was far off the sublime heights of Sir Hugh Corver, though he met Sir Hugh apparently as an equal on the Council of the Royal Society of British Architects.  Work had not surged in upon him.  He had not been able to pick and choose among commissions.  He had never won another competition.  Again and again his hopes had been horribly defeated in these ghastly enterprises, of which two were still pending.  He was a man of one job.  And a quarter of his professional life had slipped behind him!  His dreams were changed.  Formerly he had dreamed in architectural forms; now he dreamed in percentages.  His one job had been enormous and lucrative, but he had lived on it for a decade, and it was done.  And outside it he had earned probably less than twelve hundred pounds.

And if the job had been enormous, his responsibilities were likewise enormous.  Home expenses with an increasing family; establishment expenses; a heavy insurance!  Slavery to habits!  The common story, without the slightest originality in it.  The idea recurred continually:  it was the fault of Lois, of that embodied, implacable instinct which Lois was!  And it was the fault of circumstance, of the structure of society, of existence itself.  And it was his fault too.  And the whole of the blame would be his if disaster came.  Imagine those kids with the perambulator and the doll’s perambulator—­imagine