“My dear boy, any——­can go into the Army.  And if you go into the Army you’ll lose your special qualities.  I see you as the best factory designer we have, architecturally.  You’ve only just started, but you have it in you.  And your barracks is pretty good.  Of course, if you choose to indulge in sentimentality you can deprive the country of an architect in a million and make it a present of a mediocre soldier—­for you haven’t got the mind of a soldier.  But if you do that, mark my words—­you’ll only do it to satisfy the egotism that you call your heart, you’ll only do it in order to feel comfortable; just as a woman gives a penny to a beggar and thinks it’s charity when it’s nothing of the sort.  There are fellows that go and enlist because they hear a band play.”

“Yes,” George concurred.  He hated to feel himself confronted by a mind more realistic than his own, but he was realistic enough to admit the fact.  What Sir Isaac said was unanswerable, and it appealed very strongly to George.  He cast away his sentimentality, ashamed of it.  And at the same time he felt greatly relieved in other ways.

“You’d better put this Indian barracks on one side as much as you can, or employ some one to help you.  I shall want all your energies.”

“But I shall probably have to go to India.  The thing’s very urgent.”

Sir Isaac scorned him in a profound gaze.  The smoke from their two magnificent cigars mingled in a canopy above them.

“Not it!” said Sir Isaac.  “What’s more, it’s not wanted at all.  They think it is, because they’re absolutely incapable of thought.  They know the word ‘war’ and they know the word ‘barracks.’  They put them together and imagine it’s logic.  They say:  ’We were going to build a barracks, and now we’re at war.  Therefore we must hurry up with the barracks.’  That’s how they reason, and the official mind will never get beyond it. Why do they want the barracks?  If they want the barracks, what’s the meaning of what they call ‘the response of the Indian Empire’?  Are they going to send troops to India or take them away from India?  They’re going to take them away, of course.  Mutiny of India’s silent millions?  Rubbish!  Not because a mutiny would contradict the far-famed ’response of the Indian Empire,’ but because India’s silent millions haven’t got a rifle amongst them.  You needn’t tell me they’ve given you forty reasons for getting on with that barracks.  I know their reasons.  All of ’em put together only mean that in a dull, dim Oxford-and-Cambridge way they see a connexion between the word ‘war’ and the word ‘barracks.’”

George laughed, and then, after a few seconds, Sir Isaac gave a short, rough laugh.

“But if they insist on me going to India—­” George began, and paused.

Sir Isaac grew meditative.

“I say, speaking of voyages,” he murmured in a tone almost dreamy.  “If you have any loose money, put it into ships, and keep it there.  You’ll double it, you’ll treble it....  Any ships.  No matter what ships.”