I ought now to write “K.C.”  A few years ago we all thought the State would go to pieces when Victoria died.  Yet you see we are jogging along pretty well under King Edward.  In the same way, you will soon get so used to the new Head Clerk, Mrs. Claridge, that you will wonder what on earth you saw to admire in

VIVIEN WARREN.

This letter came like a cricket ball between the eyes to Bertie Adams.  His adored Miss Warren going away and no clear prospect of her return—­her farewell almost like the last words on a death-bed....  He bowed his head over his folded arms on his office desk, and gave way to gruff sobs and the brimming over of tear and nose glands which is the grotesque accompaniment of human sorrow.

He forgot for a while that he was a young man of nineteen with an unmistakable moustache and the status of a cricket eleven captain.  He was quite the boy again and his feeling for Vivien Warren, which earlier he had hardly dared to characterize, out of his intense respect for her, became once more just filial affection.

His good mother was a washerwoman-widow, in whom Honoria Fraser had interested herself in her Harley Street girlhood.  Bertie was the eldest of six, and his father had been a coal porter who broke his back tumbling down a cellar when a little “on.”  Bertie—­he now figured as Mr. Albert Adams in the cricket lists—­was a well-grown youth, rather blunt-featured, but with honest hazel eyes, fresh-coloured, shock-haired.  Vivie had once derided him for trying to woo his frontal hair into a flattened curl with much pomade ... he now only sleeked his curly hair with water.  You might even have called him “common.”  He was of the type that went out to the War from 1914 to 1918, and won it, despite the many mistakes of our flurried strategicians:  the type that so long as it lasts unspoilt will make England the predominant partner, and Great Britain the predominant nation; the type out of which are made the bluejacket and petty officer, the police sergeant, the engine driver, the railway guard, solicitor’s clerk, merchant service mate, engineer, air-pilot, chauffeur, army non-commissioned officer, head gardener, head game-keeper, farm-bailiff, head printer; the trustworthy manservant, the commissionaire of a City Office; and which in other avatars ran the British World on an average annual income of L150 before the War.  When women of a similar educated lower middle class come into full equality with men in opportunity, they should marry the Bertie Adamses of their acquaintance and not the stockbrokers, butchers, drapers, bookies, professional cricketers or pugilists.  They would then become the mothers of the salvation-generation of the British people which will found and rule Utopia.

However, Bertie Adams was quite unconscious of all these possibilities, and thought of himself modestly, rather cheaply.  Swallowing the fourth or fifth sob, he rose from his crouching over the desk, wiped his face with a wet towel, smoothed his hair, put straight his turn-over collar and smart tie, and went to his work with glowing eyes and cheeks; resolved to show Miss Warren that she had not thought too highly of him.