the bridge.  She had given him tea in the coffee-room and taken him out again, on foot, showing him the town—­the half-timbered houses, the immense castle, the market-hall, the spacious flat-fronted residences, the multiplicity of solicitors, banks and surveyors, the bursting provision shops with imposing fractions of animals and expensive pies, and the drapers with ladies’ blouses at 2s. 4d.  Then she had conducted him to an organ recital in the vast church where, amid faint gas-jets and beadles and stalls and stained glass and holiness and centuries of history and the high respectability of the town, she had whispered sibilantly, and other people had whispered, in the long intervals of the organ.  She had removed him from the church before the collection for the Red Cross, and when they had eaten a sort of dinner she had borne him away to the Russian dancers in the Moot Hall.

She said she had seen the Russian dancers once already, and that they were richly worth to him a six-hours’ train journey.  The posters of the Russian dancers were rather daring and seductive.  The Russian dancers themselves were the most desolating stage spectacle that G.J. had ever witnessed.  The troupe consisted of intensely English girls of various ages, and girl-children.  The costumes had obviously been fabricated by the artistes.  The artistes could neither dance, pose, group, make an entrance, make an exit, nor even smile.  The ballets, obviously fabricated by the same persons as the costumes, had no plot, no beginning and no end.  Crude amateurishness was the characteristic of these honest and hard-working professionals, who somehow contrived to be neither men nor women—­and assuredly not epicene—­but who travelled from country town to country town in a glamour of posters, exciting the towns, in spite of a perfect lack of sex, because they were the fabled Russian dancers.  The Moot Hall was crammed with adults and their cackling offspring, who heartily applauded the show, which indeed was billed as a “return visit” due to “terrific success” on a previous occasion.  “Is it not too marvellous,” Concepcion had said.  He had admitted that it was.  But the boredom had been excruciating.  In the street they had bought an evening paper of which he had never before heard the name, to learn news of the war.  The war, however, seemed very far off; it had grown unreal.  “We’ll talk to-morrow,” Concepcion had said, and gone abruptly to bed!  Still, he had slept well in the soft climate, to the everlasting murmur of the weir.

Then the Sunday.  She was indisposed, could not come down to breakfast, but hoped to come down to lunch, could not come down to lunch, but hoped to come down to tea, could not come down to tea—­and so on to nightfall.  The Sunday had been like a thousand years to him.  He had learnt the town, and the suburbs of it; the grass-grown streets, the main thoroughfares, and the slums; by the afternoon he was recognising familiar faces in the town.