But the pertinacity of Mr. Soulter, first Councillor, then Alderman, then Mayor, the true father of the town hall, had been victorious in the end.  Next there had been an infinity of trouble with owners of adjacent properties and with the foundations.  Next the local contractor, who had got the work through a ruthless and ingenious conspiracy of associates on the Council, had gone bankrupt.  Next came the gigantic building strike, in which conflicting volitions fought each other for many months to the devastation of an entire group of trades.  Finally was the inflexible resolution of Mr. Soulter that the town hall should not be opened and used until it was finished in every part and every detail of furniture and decoration.

George, by his frequent sojourns in the city, and his official connexion with the authorities, had several opportunities to observe the cabals, the chicane, and the personal animosities and friendships which functioned in secret at the very heart of the city’s life.  He knew the idiosyncrasies of councillors and aldermen in committee; he had learnt more about mankind in the committee-rooms of the old town hall than he could have learnt in ten thousand London clubs.  He could divide the city council infallibly into wire-pullers, axe-grinders, vain nincompoops, honest mediocrities, and the handful who combined honesty with sagacity and sagacity with strength.  At beefy luncheon-tables, and in gorgeous, stuffy bars tapestried with Lincrusta-Walton, he had listened to the innumerable tales of the town, in which greed, crookedness, ambition, rectitude, hatred, and sexual love were extraordinarily mixed—­the last being by far the smallest ingredient.  He liked the town; he revelled in it.  It seemed to him splendid in its ineradicable, ever-changing, changeless humanity.  And as the train bored its way through the granite bowels of the city, he thought pleasurably upon all these matters.  And with them in his mind there gradually mingled the images of Lois and Marguerite.  He cared not what their virtues were or what their faults were.  He enjoyed reflecting upon them, picturing them with their contrasted attributes, following them into the future as they developed blindly under the unperceived sway of the paramount instincts which had impelled and would always impel them towards their ultimate destiny.  He thought upon himself, and about himself he was very sturdily cheerful, because he had had a most satisfactory interview with Sir Isaac on the previous afternoon.

A few minutes later he walked behind a portmanteau-bearing night-porter into the wide-corridored, sleeping hotel, whose dust glittered in the straight shafts of early sunlight.  He stopped at the big slate under the staircase and wrote in chalk opposite the number 187:  “Not to be called till 12 o’clock, under pain of death.”  And the porter, a friend of some years’ standing, laughed.  On the second floor that same porter dropped the baggage on the linoleum and rattled the key in the lock with a high disregard of sleepers.  In the bedroom the porter undid the straps of the portmanteau, and then: