He divined from the way in which she kissed him good-bye that she was excessively proud of him.

“Mater,” he said, “I see you’re still a girl.”

As he was leaving, Mr. Clayhanger halted him.

“You said something in your last letter about storing the furniture, didn’t you?  Have ye made any inquiries?”

“No.  But I’ve told Orgreave.  You might look into that, because—­well, you’ll see.”

From the hall he glanced into the dining-room and up the stairs.  The furniture that filled the house had been new ten years earlier; it had been anybody’s furniture.  The passage of ten years, marvellously swift, had given character to the furniture, charged it with associations, scarred it with the history of a family—­his family, individualized it, humanized it.  It was no longer anybody’s furniture.  With a pang he pictured it numbered and crowded into a warehouse, forlorn, thick with dust, tragic, exiled from men and women.

He drove off, waving.  His stepfather waved from the door, his mother waved from the dining-room; the cook had taken the children into the drawing-room, where they shook their short, chubby arms at him, smiling.  On the second floor the back of the large rectangular mirror on the dressing-table presented a flat and wooden negative to his anxious curiosity.

In the neighbourhood of Wimbledon the taxi-driver ascertained his destination at the first inquiry from a strolling soldier.  It was the Blue Lion public-house.  The taxi skirted the Common, parts of which were covered with horse-lines and tents.  Farther on, in vague suburban streets, the taxi stopped at a corner building with a blatant, curved gilt sign and a very big lamp.  A sentry did something with his rifle as George got out, and another soldier obligingly took the luggage.  A clumsy painted board stuck on a pole at the entrance to a side-passage indicated that George had indeed arrived at his Headquarters.  He was directed to a small, frowzy apartment, which apparently had once been the land-lord’s sitting-room.  Two officers, Colonel Hullocher and his Adjutant, both with ribbons, were seated close together at a littered deal table, behind a telephone whose cord, instead of descending modestly to the floor, went up in sight of all men to the ceiling.  In a corner a soldier, the Colonel’s confidential clerk, was writing at another table.  Everything was dirty and untidy.  Neither of the officers looked at George.  The Adjutant was excitedly reading to the Colonel and the Colonel was excitedly listening and muttering.  The clerk too was in a state of excitement.  George advanced towards the table, and saluted and stood at attention.  The Adjutant continued to read and the Colonel to murmur, but the Adjutant did manage to give a momentary surreptitious glance at George.  After some time the Colonel, who was a short, stout, bald, restless man, interrupted the reading, and, still without having looked at George, growled impatiently to the Adjutant: