in submitting the affair of its barracks to even a limited competition, when it might just as easily have awarded the job to any architect whom it happened to know, or whom its wife, cousin, or aunt happened to know, or whose wife, cousin, or aunt happened to know the India Office—­and further, that George ought therefore to be deeply grateful.  It said that in view of the war the barracks must be erected with the utmost possible, or rather with quite impossible, dispatch, and that George would probably have to go to India at once.  Simultaneously it daily modified George’s accepted plans for the structure, exactly as though it was a professional architect and George an amateur, and it involved him in a seemly but intense altercation between itself and the subordinate bureaucracy of a Presidency.  It kept George employed.  In due course people discovered that business must proceed as usual, and even the architectural profession, despite its traditional pessimism, had hopes of municipalities and other bodies which were to inaugurate public works in order to diminish unemployment.

Nevertheless George had extreme difficulty in applying himself efficiently to urgent tasks.  He kept thinking:  “It’s come!  It’s come!” He could not get over the fact that it had come—­the European War which had obsessed men’s minds for so many years past.  He saved the face of his own theory as to the immediate impossibility of a great war, by positively asserting that Germany would never have fought had she foreseen that Britain would fight.  He prophesied (to himself) Germany’s victory, German domination of Europe, and, as the grand central phenomenon, mysterious ruin for George Edwin Cannon.  But the next instant he would be convinced that Germany would be smashed, and quickly.  Germany, he reckoned superiorly, in ‘taking on England’ had ‘bitten off more than she could chew.’

He knew almost naught of the progress of the fighting.  He had obtained an expensive map of Western Europe and some flagged pins, and had hung the map up in his hall and had stuck the pins into it with exactitude.  He had moved the pins daily, until little Laurencine one morning, aloft on a chair, decided to change all the positions of the opposing armies.  Laurencine established German army corps in Marseilles, the Knockmillydown Mountains, and Torquay, while sending the French to Elsinore and Aberdeen.  There was trouble in the house.  Laurencine suffered, and was given to understand that war was a serious matter.  Still, George soon afterwards had ceased to manipulate the pins; they seemed to be incapable of arousing his imagination; he could not be bothered with them; he could not make the effort necessary to acquire a scientific conception of the western campaign—­not to mention the eastern, as to which his ignorance was nearly perfect.