“Well, I call it bad,” said the examiner, showing testiness.  The examiner too could be impulsive, was indeed apt to be short-tempered.  The next instant he seized one of the brilliant perspective sketches, and by his mere manner of holding it between his thumb and finger he sneered at it and condemned it.

He snapped out, not angrily—­rather pityingly: 

“And what the devil’s this?”

George, furious, retorted: 

“What the hell do you think it is?”

He had not foreseen that he was going to say such a thing.  The traffic in Regent Street, which had been inaudible to both of them, was loud in their ears.

The examiner had committed a peccadillo, George a terrible crime.  The next morning the episode, in various forms, was somehow common knowledge and a source of immense diversion.  George went through the second day, but lifelessly.  He was sure he had failed.  Apart from the significance of the fact that the viva voce counted for 550 marks out of a total of 1200, he felt that the Royal Institute of British Architects would know how to defend its dignity.  On the Saturday morning John Orgreave had positive secret information that George would be plucked.

IV

On that same Saturday afternoon George and Marguerite went out together.  She had given him a rendezvous in Brompton Cemetery, choosing this spot partly because it was conveniently near and partly in unconscious obedience to the traditional instinct of lovers for the society of the undisturbing dead.  Each of them had a roofed habitation, but neither could employ it for the ends of love.  No. 8 was barred to George as much by his own dignity as by the invisible sword of the old man; and of course he could not break the immemorial savage taboo of a club by introducing a girl into it.  The Duke of Wellington himself, though Candle Court was his purdah, could never have broken the taboo of even so modest a club as Pickering’s.  Owing to the absence of Agg, who had gone to Wales with part of her family, the studio in Manresa Road was equally closed to the pair.

Marguerite was first at the rendezvous.  George saw her walking sedately near the entrance.  Despite her sedateness she had unmistakably the air of waiting at a tryst.  Anybody at a glance would have said that she was expecting a man.  She had the classical demure innocency of her situation.  George did not care for that.  Why?  She in fact was expecting a man, and in expecting him she had nothing to be ashamed of.  Well, he did not care for it.  He did not care for her being like other girls of her class.  In his pocket he had an invitation from Miss Wheeler for the next evening.  Would Miss Wheeler wait for a man in a public place, especially a cemetery?  Would Lois Ingram?  Would Laurencine?  He could not picture them so waiting.  Oh, simpleton, unlearned in the world!  A snob too, no doubt! (He actually thought that Hyde Park would have been ‘better’ than the cemetery for their rendezvous.) And illogical!  If No. 8 had been open to them, and the studio, and the club, he would have accepted with gusto the idea of an open-air rendezvous.  But since there was no alternative to an open-air rendezvous the idea of it humiliated and repelled him.