and no clear prospect of
her return--her farewell almost like the last words on a death-bed....
He bowed his head over his folded arms on his office desk, and
gave way to gruff sobs and the brimming over of tear and nose glands
which is the grotesque accompaniment of human sorrow.

He forgot for a while that he was a young man of nineteen with an
unmistakable moustache and the status of a cricket eleven captain.
He was quite the boy again and his feeling for Vivien Warren, which
earlier he had hardly dared to characterize, out of his intense
respect for her, became once more just filial affection.

His good mother was a washerwoman-widow, in whom Honoria Fraser had
interested herself in her Harley Street girlhood. Bertie was the
eldest of six, and his father had been a coal porter who broke his
back tumbling down a cellar when a little "on." Bertie--he now
figured as Mr. Albert Adams in the cricket lists--was a well-grown
youth, rather blunt-featured, but with honest hazel eyes,
fresh-coloured, shock-haired. Vivie had once derided him for trying
to woo his frontal hair into a flattened curl with much pomade ...
he now only sleeked his curly hair with water. You might even have
called him "common." He was of the type that went out to the War
from 1914 to 1918, and won it, despite the many mistakes of our
flurried strategicians: the type that so long as it lasts unspoilt
will make England the predominant partner, and Great Britain the
predominant nation; the type out of which are made the bluejacket
and petty officer, the police sergeant, the engine driver, the
railway guard, solicitor's clerk, merchant service mate, engineer,
air-pilot, chauffeur, army non-commissioned officer, head gardener,
head game-keeper, farm-bailiff, head printer; the trustworthy
manservant, the commissionaire of a City Office; and which in other
avatars ran the British World on an average annual income of L150
before the War. When women of a similar educated lower middle class
come into full equality with men in opportunity, they should marry
the Bertie Adamses of their acquaintance and not the stockbrokers,
butchers, drapers, bookies, professional cricketers or pugilists.
They would then become the mothers of the salvation-generation of
the British people which will found and rule Utopia.

However, Bertie Adams was quite unconscious of all these
possibilities, and thought of himself modestly, rather cheaply.
Swallowing the fourth or fifth s