“When I was a little boy I remember my father telling me that this town hall had been started.  I never expected to live to see it finished—­”

Delighted guffaws, uproarious laughter, explosions of mirth, interrupted this witty reference to the delays in construction.  The speaker smiled at ease.  His eyes glinted.  He knew his audience, held it consummately, and went on.

In the afternoon there was a conversazione, or reception, for the lunchers and also for the outer fringe of the city’s solid respectability.  The whole of the town hall from basement to roof was open to view, and citizens of all ages wandered in it everywhere, admiring it, quizzing it, and feeling proudly that it was theirs.  George too wandered about, feeling that it was his.  He was slowly recovering from the humiliation of the lunch.  Much of the building pleased him greatly; at the excellence of some effects and details he marvelled; the entry into the large hall from the grand staircase was dramatic, just as he had had intended it should be; the organ was being played, and word went round that the acoustic (or acoostic) properties of the auditorium were perfect, and unrivalled by any auditorium in the kingdom.  On the other hand, the crudity of certain other effects and details irritated the creator, helping him to perceive how much he had learnt in ten years; in ten years, for example, his ideas about mouldings had been quite transformed.  What chiefly satisfied him was the demonstration, everywhere, that he had mastered his deep natural impatience of minutiae —­that instinct which often so violently resented the exacting irksomeness of trifles in the realization of a splendid idea.  At intervals he met an acquaintance and talked, but nobody at all appeared to comprehend that he alone was the creator of the mighty pile, and that all the individuals present might be divided artistically into two classes—­himself in one class, the entire remainder in the other.  And nobody appeared to be inconvenienced by the sense of the height of his achievement or of the splendour of his triumph that day.  It is true that the north hates to seem impressed, and will descend to any duplicity in order not to seem impressed.

The Town Clerk’s clerk came importantly up to him and asked: 

“How many reserved seats would you like for the concert?”

A grand ballad concert, at which the most sentimental of contraltos, helped by other first-class throats, was to minister wholesale to the insatiable secret sentimentality of the north, had been arranged for the evening.

“One will be enough,” said George.

“Are you alone?” asked the Town Clerk’s clerk.