The crisis arrived in the afternoon of the first of the two days.  His brain was quite clear.  Thousands of details about drainage, ventilation, shoring, architectural practice, lighting, subsoils, specifications, iron and steel construction, under-pinning, the properties of building materials, strains, thrusts, water-supply; thousands of details about his designs—­the designs in his ‘testimonies of study,’ the design for his Thesis, and the designs produced during the examination itself—­all these peopled his brain; but they were in order; they were under control; they were his slaves.  For four and a half hours, off and on, he had admirably displayed the reality of his knowledge, and then he was sent into a fresh room to meet a fresh examiner.  There he stood in the room alone with his designs for a small provincial town hall—­a key-plan, several one-eighth scale-plans, a piece of half-inch detail, and two rough perspective sketches which he knew were brilliant.  The room was hot; through the open window came the distant sound of the traffic of Regent Street.  The strange melancholy of a city in summer floated towards him from the outside and reinforced his own.

The examiner, who had been snatching tea, entered briskly and sternly.  He was a small, dapper, fair man of about fifty, with wonderfully tended finger-nails.  George despised him because Mr. Enwright despised him, but he had met him once in the way of the firm’s business and found him urbane.

“Good afternoon,” said George politely.

The examiner replied, trotting along the length of the desk with quick, short steps: 

“Now about this work of yours.  I’ve looked at it with some care——­” His speech was like his demeanour and his finger-nails.

“Boor!” thought George.  But he could not actively resent the slight.  He glanced round at the walls; he was in a prison.  He was at the mercy of a tyrant invested with omnipotence.

The little tyrant, however, was superficially affable.  Only now and then in his prim, courteous voice was there a hint of hostility and cruelty.  He put a number of questions, the answers to which had to be George’s justification.  He said “H’m!” and “Ah!” and “Really?” He came to the matter of spouting.

“Now, I object to hopper-heads,” he said.  “I regard them as unhygienic.”

And he looked coldly at George with eyebrows lifted.  George returned the gaze.

“I know you do, sir,” George replied.

Indeed it was notorious that hopper-heads to vertical spouting were a special antipathy of the examiner’s; he was a famous faddist.  But the reply was a mistake.  The examiner, secure in his attributes, ignored the sally.  A little later, taking up the general plan of the town hall, he said: 

“The fact is, I do—­not—­care for this kind of thing.  The whole tendency——­”

“Excuse me, sir,” George interrupted, with conscious and elaborate respectfulness.  “But surely the question isn’t one of personal preferences.  Is the design good or is it bad?”