Never had Mr. Enwright enjoyed himself more purely, and at the close he knew with satisfaction that he had put Paris in a proper perspective for George, and perhaps saved the youth from years of groping misapprehension.  As for George, all his preconceived notions about Paris had been destroyed or shaken.  In the quadrangles of the Louvre, for example, Mr. Enwright, pointing to the under part of the stone bench that foots so much of the walls, had said:  “Look at that curve.”  Nothing else.  No ecstasies about the sculptures of Jean Goujon and Carpeaux, or about the marvellous harmony of the East facade!  But a flick of the cane towards the half-hidden moulding!  And George had felt with a thrill what an exquisite curve and what an original curve and what a modest curve that curve was.  Suddenly and magically his eyes had been opened.  Or it might have been that a deceitful mist had rolled away and the real Louvre been revealed in its esoteric and sole authentic beauty....

“Why don’t you try Chelsea?” said Mr. Enwright over his shoulder, proceeding towards the stairs.

“I was thinking of Chelsea.”

“You were!” Mr. Enwright halted again for an instant.  “It’s the only place in London where the structure of society is anything like Paris.  Why, dash it, in the King’s Road the grocers know each other’s business!” Mr. Enwright made the last strange remark to the outer door, and vanished.

“Funny cove!” George commented tolerantly to Mr. Haim, who passed through the room immediately afterwards to his nightly task of collecting and inspecting the scattered instruments on the principal’s august drawing-board.

But Mr. Haim, though possibly he smiled ever so little, would not compromise himself by an endorsement of the criticism of his employer.  George was a mere incident in the eternal career of Mr. Haim at Lucas & Enwright’s.

When the factotum came back into the pupils’ room, George stood up straight and smoothed his trousers and gazed admiringly at his elegant bright socks.

“Let me see,” said George in a very friendly manner. “You live somewhere in Chelsea, don’t you?”

“Yes,” answered Mr. Haim.

“Whereabouts, if it isn’t a rude question?”

“Well,” said Mr. Haim, confidentially and benignantly, captivated by George’s youthful charm, “it’s near the Redcliffe Arms.”  He mentioned the Redcliffe Arms as he might have mentioned the Bank, Piccadilly Circus, or Gibraltar.  “Alexandra Grove.  No. 8.  To tell you the truth, I own the house.”

“The deuce you do!”

“Yes.  The leasehold, that is, of course.  No freeholds knocking about loose in that district!”

George saw a new and unsuspected Mr. Haim.  He was impressed.  And he was glad that he had never broken the office tradition of treating Mr. Haim with a respect not usually accorded to factotums.  He saw a, property-owner, a tax-payer, and a human being behind the spectacles of the shuffling, rather shabby, ceremonious familiar that pervaded those rooms daily from before ten till after six.  He grew curious about a living phenomenon that hitherto had never awakened his curiosity.