" of
the "house". The girl smiled, the young man bowed. In an instant the
manager appeared, and G.J. was invested with the attributes of God. He
informed the manager with pain, and the manager heard with deep
pain, that the left boot of the new pair he then wore was not quite
comfortable in the toes. The manager simply could not understand it,
just as he simply could not have understood a failure in the working
of the law of gravity. And if God had not told him he would not have
believed it. He knelt and felt. He would send for the boots. He would
make the boots comfortable or he would make a new pair. Expense was
nothing. Trouble was nothing. Incidentally he remarked with a sigh
that the enormous demand for military boots was rendering it more and
more difficult for him to give to old patrons that prompt and plenary
attention which he would desire to give. However, God in any case
should not suffer. He noticed that the boots were not quite well
polished, and he ventured to charge God with hints for God's personal
attendant. Then he went swiftly across to a speaking-tube and snapped:

"Polisher!"

A trap-door opened in the floor of the shop and a horrible, pallid,
weak, cringing man came up out of the earth of St. James's, and knelt
before God far more submissively than even the manager had knelt. He
had brushes and blacking, and he blacked and he brushed and breathed
alternately, undoing continually with his breath or his filthy hand
what he had done with his brush. He never looked up, never spoke. When
he had made the boots like mirrors he gathered together his implements
and vanished, silent and dutifully bent, through the trap-door back
into the earth of St. James's. And because the trap-door had not
shut properly the manager stamped on it and stamped down the pale man
definitely into the darkness underneath. And then G.J. was wafted out
of the shop with smiles and bows.

Chapter 9

THE CLUB

The vast "morning-room" of the Monumental Club (pre-eminent among
clubs for its architecture) was on the whole tonically chilly. But
as one of the high windows stood open, and there were two fires
fluttering beneath the lovely marble mantelpieces, between the fires
and the window every gradation of temperature could be experienced by
the curious. On each wall book-shelves rose to the carved and gilded
ceiling. The furlongs of shelves were fitted with majestic volumes
containing all the Statutes, all the Parliamen