He now looked on Wilkins’s for the first time in his life, and he was even more afraid of it than he had been while thinking about it in the vestibule of the Majestic.  It was not larger than the Majestic; it was perhaps smaller; it could not show more terra-cotta, plate-glass and sculptured cornice than the Majestic.  But it had a demeanour ... and it was in a square which had a demeanour....  In every window-sill—­not only of the hotel, but of nearly every mighty house in the Square—­there were boxes of bright blooming flowers.  These he could plainly distinguish in the October dusk, and they were a wonderful phenomenon—­say what you will about the mildness of that particular October!  A sublime tranquillity reigned over the scene.  A liveried keeper was locking the gate of the garden in the middle of the Square as if potentates had just quitted it and rendered it for ever sacred.  And between the sacred shadowed grove and the inscrutable fronts of the stately houses there flitted automobiles of the silent and expensive kind, driven by chauffeurs in pale grey or dark purple, who reclined as they steered, and who were supported on their left sides by footmen who reclined as they contemplated the grandeur of existence.

Edward Henry’s taxi-cab in that Square seemed like a homeless cat that had strayed into a dog-show.

At the exact instant, when the taxi-cab came to rest under the massive portico of Wilkins’s, a chamberlain in white gloves bravely soiled the gloves by seizing the vile brass handle of its door.  He bowed to Edward Henry and assisted him to alight on to a crimson carpet.  The driver of the taxi glanced with pert and candid scorn at the chamberlain, but Edward Henry looked demurely aside, and then in abstraction mounted the broad carpeted steps.

“What about poor little me?” cried the driver, who was evidently a ribald socialist, or at best a republican.

The chamberlain, pained, glanced at Edward Henry for support and direction in this crisis.

“Didn’t I tell you I’d keep you?” said Edward Henry, raised now by the steps above the driver.

“Between you and me, you didn’t,” said the driver.

The chamberlain, with an ineffable gesture, wafted the taxi-cab away into some limbo appointed for waiting vehicles.

A page opened a pair of doors, and another page opened another pair of doors, each with eighteen century ceremonies of deference, and Edward Henry stood at length in the hall of Wilkins’s.  The sanctuary, then, was successfully defiled, and up to the present nobody had demanded his credentials!  He took breath.