They even apologized to him for having, in his absence, appointed an interim successor. Sir Philip’s death created a situation unprecedented in the history of the firm because never before had the Head died with his son unready to take the reins, and the war aggravated the situation. Rupert’s training could not begin till the war ended; it would be many years before he took his place at the head of the table, Chairman of the Board. Behind the training they underwent was the theory of the machine with interchangeable parts; it was assumed that the general technical knowledge they all acquired fitted each for any post to which the Service might appoint him. They did not overrate mere technique but they relied upon the quality of the Hepplestalls. If occasion called a Hepplestall, he rose to it. This occasion, the occasion of a regency, had called William Hepplestall, Sir Philip’s brother next in age to him. William had not sought, but neither did he shirk, the burden of responsibility. “I will do my duty,” he had said. “You know me. I am not an imaginative man, and the times are difficult. But I will do my duty.” It would, certainly, not have occurred to William in the first days of the war to convert their Dye-House from, cotton dyeing to woolen: that sort of march into foreign territory, so extraordinarily lucrative, would have occurred to none but to Sir Philip, and they understood very well that under William, or under any of them now, the control would be prudent and uninspired. They looked to Rupert as inheritor cf the Hepplestall tradition of inspiration in leadership. Calmly they made the vast assumption not only that he was coming to them but that he was coming to be, eventually, a leader to them as brilliant as Sir Philip had been. “I shall not see it,” said old Horace, “but I do not need to see. We continue, we Hepplestalls; we serve.” Amiably, implacably, with embarrassing deference to Sir Philip’s son, they pinned him to his doom, and in France, when he had heard of this meeting they arranged for him, he had thought of it as a comic interlude, and of himself as one who would relax from great affairs to watch these little men at play! He sat weighed down, in misery. In London he had decided that he wouldn’t argue, but he hadn’t known that he could not argue. He was oppressed to taciturnity, to speechless sulking which they took, since Rupert did everything, even sulking, pleasantly, to mean that he was overwhelmed by the renewal, through their eulogies, of his personal grief for the loss of his father. They spoke tactfully of the war, deferring to him as a soldier; they aimed with family news in gossipy vein of this and that Hepplestall in and out of the war, to put him at his ease, and soon the meeting ended. They took it as natural that he wished to spend his leave in London. It seemed they understood. They advised about trains.