While gallantly and probably necessarily discreet as to his conquests, he was always prepared to talk about love, and to give subtle erotic advice, which led any man who had actually lain with a woman to suspect that Mr. Upjohn was at best a fumbler and probably still a virgin. Mr. Upjohn then endued a very Regency thin grey overcoat, stuck a long ebony cane with no handle under his left arm-pit, tossed a soft grey hat rakishly on to his hair, and made for the door. George followed, half-impressed, half-amused by this childish swagger and self-conscious bounce. * * * * * In the street the Sabbath ennui of London emerged from its lair like a large dull grey octopus, and shot stealthy feelers of depression at them. Mr. Upjohn, safe as Achilles in the Stygian dip of his conceit, strode along energetically with an inward feeling that he had gone one better on James McNeill Whistler. The boredom of Mr. Upjohn came from within, not from without. He was so absorbed in Mr. Upjohn that he rarely noticed what was going on about him. George fought at the monster and plunged desperately into talk. “What about this coal strike? Will it ruin the country as the papers say? Isn’t it a foolish thing on both sides?” This strike was George’s first introduction to the reality of the “social problem” and the bitter class hatred which smoulders in England and at times bursts into fierce crises of hatred, restrained only by that mingling of fear and “decency” which composes the servile character of the British working man. “Well, what I mean to say is,” said Mr. Upjohn, who very rarely managed to say what he meant but always meant to say something original and startling, “it ain’t our affair. But what I mean is, if the miners get more money it’ll be all the better for us. They’re more likely to buy our pictures than sons of bitches like Mond and old Asquith.” George was a bit staggered at this. In the first place, he had been looking at the problem from a national, not a personal, point of view. And, in the second place, he knew just a little about working men and their conditions. He could not see how five shillings a week more would convert the miners to collecting the Suprematist school of painting, or make them abandon their cultivated amusements of coursing, pigeon flying, gambling, wife-beating, and drinking. But Mr. Upjohn delivered his _obiter dicta_ with so much aplomb that a boy of twenty might be excused for failing to see their complete absurdity. * * * * *