George stayed till the end of the show.  The emptying of the theatre was like a battle, like the flight of millions from a conflagration.  All humanity seemed to be crowded into the corridors and staircases.  Jostled and disordered, he emerged into the broad street, along which huge, lighted trams slowly thundered.  He walked a little, starting a fresh cigar.  The multitude had resumed its calm.  A few noisy men laughed and swore obscene oaths; and girls, either in couples or with men, trudged, demure and unshocked, past the roysterers, as though they had neither ears to hear nor eyes to see.  In a few minutes the processions were dissipated, dissolved into the vastness of the city, and the pavements nearly deserted.  George strolled on towards the Square.  The town hall stood up against the velvet pallor of the starry summer night, massive, lovely, supreme, deserted.  He had conceived it in an office in Russell Square when he was a boy.  And there it was, the mightiest monument of the city which had endured through centuries of astounding corporate adventure.  He was overwhelmed, and he was inexpressibly triumphant.  Throughout the day he had had no recognition; and as regards the future, few, while ignorantly admiring the monument, would give a thought to the artist.  Books were eternally signed, and pictures, and sculpture.  But the architect was forgotten.  What did it matter?  If the creators of Gothic cathedrals had to accept oblivion, he might.  The tower should be his signature.  And no artist could imprint his influence so powerfully and so mysteriously upon the unconscious city as he was doing.  And the planet was whirling the whole city round like an atom in the icy spaces between the stars.  And perhaps Lois was lying expectant, discontented, upon the sofa, thinking rebelliously.  He was filled with the realization of universality.

At the hotel another telegram awaited him.

“Good old Ponting!” he exclaimed, after reading it.  The message ran: 

“We have won it.—­PONTING”

He said: 

“Why ‘we,’ Ponting?  You didn’t win it.  I won it.”

He said: 

“Sir Hugh Corver is not going to be the head of the architectural profession.  I am.”  He felt the assurance of that in his bones.

CHAPTER II

THE ROLL-CALL

I

The telephone rang in the principal’s room of George’s office in Museum Street.  He raised his head from the drawing-board with the false gesture of fatigued impatience which, as a business man, he had long since acquired, and took the instrument.  As a fact he was not really busy; he was only pretending to be busy; and he rather enjoyed the summons of the telephone, with its eternal promise of some romantic new turn of existence.  Nevertheless, though he was quite alone, he had to affect that the telephone was his bane.