He occupied in Johnson’s renowned establishment an obscure position. He sat in a small room with two male typists at the top of three flights of stairs. He sorted out press cuttings, despatched the right copy to the right papers, entered up the proofs in a large folio, checked the returned slips, supplied a head clerk with lists giving the space rates and percentages allowed to agents. It was routine work that required an orderly mind; that quality Miller possessed, and his employers estimated its value at three pounds five shillings a week. An unexciting job for a man who three years earlier had been in command of a company of Fusiliers. But it was the best he had been able to find, and his friends had assured him that he had been remarkably lucky to get it. As soon as the Armistice was signed he had commenced a series of desperate assaults on the War Office; he had claimed in turn to be a pivotal man, an educational authority, a university student. He had even considered an appeal on sympathetic grounds. Finally, he was allowed to transfer his commission from the regular army to the reserve of officers, and in April he was able to walk a free man down Savile Row and carefully finger the tailor’s samples of tweed and serge. Great days, undoubtedly. He had a good balance at Cox’s; a large gratuity was due to him. For two months he enjoyed himself. Then he began to look for a job. He had hoped vaguely for some sort of Government post with a good salary and not a great deal of work. But he soon discovered that Whitehall was more than full, and that civil service jobs abroad were going to the men from the Universities. He felt lost in a world that moved so fast and with such complete detachment from his interests. At last, through the influence of a fellow-officer, he had got this advertising job. “And very lucky too,” he had been told. Miller did not appreciate his fortune. At first he had managed to work himself into a mood of self-complacence; every evening, as he walked home from the office, he had reminded himself that a year ago he had been standing in a narrow trench waiting for the stand to, with the prospect of a cold night, to be spent either in patrols or in working parties; whereas now he was going back to a good dinner, a warm fire, and, afterwards, a soft bed--a very different proposition. And, as he sat reading the paper, he remembered pleasantly the cold wind that swept over the lonely hills. He always thought of France as he walked home. “A year ago,” he would say to himself, and try to reconstruct the scene; where had he been, what had he been doing, what had he thought; only twelve months ago he had belonged to a different life.