Theoretically, they should have shrunk, to his maturer gaze, from his boyish recollection of them, but they were authentically impressive. He couldn’t think lightly of this regiment of desks, nor could he pretend that the eyes which turned towards him as his loud-voiced pilot announced him, were hostile. Theory was in chancery again; all employees ought to hate all employers, but the elderly gentlemen who were hastening towards him wore on their faces expressions of genuine pleasure instead of the decent deference that might cloak a mortal hatred. Ridiculously as if he had been indeed a prince on the day when Sir Philip took him round and introduced him, he discovered a royal memory, and remembered their names. It was developing into a reception; this wasn’t at all what he had come for. He wondered what the younger clerks were thinking, men of his own age, ex-service men, but he had not the chance even to look at them. A positive guard of honor was escorting him to William’s room, that joss-house of the Hepplestalls. If only he could laugh at their formality and at their quaint appreciativeness of his knowing their names! He felt he ought to laugh; he felt it was all something out of Dickens. Or if he could blurt out that he had come to slip the collar for ever from his neck! They would scuttle from him as though he were the plague; but he could neither laugh aloud nor tell the truth to those solemn mandarins. They were not pompous fools, or he could have laughed, he could have scattered them impishly with his truth; but they were captains in a Service where promotion went by merit, they were proven efficients in an organization whose efficiency was world-renowned, and their homage was not absurd because it was paid not to the young man, Rupert Hepplestall, but to Sir Philip’s son, to the successor to the Headship of the Service. That made it the more hypocritical in him to seem to accept their homage, but if he was going to forfeit what good opinion they retained of a truant, he was going to keep it, at any rate, until the die was unalterably cast.