Although Mrs. Braiding was present, holding his ebony stick, he carefully examined his face and appearance without the slightest self-consciousness.  Nor did Mrs. Braiding’s demeanour indicate that in her opinion G.J. was behaving in a manner eccentric or incorrect.  He was dressed in mourning.  Honestly he did not believe that he looked anywhere near fifty.  His face was worn by the friction of the world, especially under the eyes, but his eyes were youthful, and his hair and moustache and short, fine beard scarcely tinged with grey.  His features showed benevolence, with a certain firmness, and they had the refinement which comes of half a century’s instinctive avoidance of excess.  Still, he was beginning to feel his age.  He moved more slowly; he sat down, instead of standing up, at the dressing-table.  And he was beginning also to take a pride in mentioning these changes and in the fact that he would be fifty on his next birthday.  And when talking to men under thirty, or even under forty, he would say in a tone mingling condescension and envy:  “But, of course, you’re young.”

He departed, remarking that he should not be in for lunch and might not be in for dinner, and he walked down the covered way to the Albany Courtyard, and was approved by the Albany porters as a resident handsomely conforming to the traditional high standard set by the Albany for its residents.  He crossed Piccadilly, and as he did so he saw a couple of jolly fine girls, handsome, stylish, independent of carriage, swinging freely along and intimately talking with that mien of experience and broad-mindedness which some girls manage to wear in the streets.  One of them in particular appealed to him.  He thought how different they were from Christine.  He had dreamt of just such girls as they were, and yet now Christine filled the whole of his mind.

“You can’t foresee,” he thought.

He dipped down into the extraordinary rectangle of St. James’s, where he was utterly at home.  A strange architecture, parsimoniously plain on the outside, indeed carrying the Oriental scorn for merely external effect to a point only reachable by a race at once hypocritical and madly proud.  The shabby plainness of Wren’s church well typified all the parochial parsimony.  The despairing architect had been so pinched by his employers in the matter of ornament that on the whole of the northern facade there was only one of his favourite cherub’s heads!  What a parish!

It was a parish of flat brick walls and brass door-knobs and brass plates.  And the first commandment was to polish every brass door-knob and every brass plate every morning.  What happened in the way of disfigurement by polishing paste to the surrounding brick or wood had no importance.  The conventions of the parish had no eye save for brass door-knobs and brass plates, which were maintained daily in effulgence by a vast early-rising population.  Recruiting offices, casualty lists, the rumour of peril and of glory, could do nothing to diminish the high urgency of the polishing of those brass door-knobs and those brass plates.