too. Yes, I shan't be
deserting her."

The remark disquieted his triumph. That aspect of the matter had not
occurred to him.

Chapter 36

COLLAPSE

Late of that same afternoon G.J., in the absence of the chairman,
presided as honorary secretary over a meeting of the executive
committee of the Lechford hospitals. In the course of the war the
committee had changed its habitation more than once. The hotel which
had at first given it a home had long ago been commandeered by the
Government for a new Government department, and its hundreds of
chambers were now full of the clicking of typewriters and the
dictation of officially phrased correspondence, and the
conferences which precede decisions, and the untamed footsteps of
messenger-flappers, and the making of tea, and chatter about cinemas,
blouses and headaches. Afterwards the committee had been the guest of
a bank and of a trust company, and had for a period even paid rent to
a common landlord. But its object was always to escape the formality
of rent-paying, and it was now lodged in an untenanted mansion
belonging to a viscount in a great Belgravian square. Its sign was
spread high across the facade; its posters were in the windows; and on
the door was a notice such as in 1914 nobody had ever expected to see
in that quadrangle of guarded sacred castles: "Turn the handle and
walk in." The mansion, though much later in date, was built precisely
on the lines of a typical Bloomsbury boarding-house. It had the same
basement, the same general disposition of rooms, the same abundance
of stairs and paucity of baths, the same chilly draughts and primeval
devices for heating, and the same superb disregard for the convenience
of servants. The patrons of domestic architecture had permitted
architects to learn nothing in seventy years except that chimney-flues
must be constructed so that they could be cleaned without exposing
sooty infants to the danger of suffocation or incineration.

The committee sat on the first floor in the back drawing-room,
whose furniture consisted of a deal table, Windsor chairs, a row of
hat-pegs, a wooden box containing coal, half a poker, two unshaded
lights; the walls, from which all the paper had been torn off, were
decorated with lists of sub-committees, posters, and rows of figures
scrawled here and there in pencil. The room was divided from the main
drawing-room by the usual folding-doors. The smaller apartment had
been chosen in the