And the bureaucrat then? Growing fat and soft like himself, or dry and stringy like Macmaster or old Ingleby? They did men's work: exact observation: return no. 17642 with figures exact. Yet they grew hysterical: they ran about corridors or frantically rang table bells, asking with high voices of querulous eunuchs why form ninety thousand and two wasn't ready. Nevertheless men liked the bureaucratic life: his own brother, Mark, head of the family: heir to Groby. . . . Fifteen years older: a quiet stick: wooden: brown: always in a bowler hat, as often as not with his racing-glasses hung around him. Attending his first-class office when he liked: too good a man for any administration to lose by putting on the screw. . . . But heir to Groby: what would that stick make of the place? . . . Let it, no doubt, and go on pottering from the Albany to race meetings--where he never betted--to Whitehall, where he was said to be indispensable. . . . Why indispensable? Why in heaven's name? That stick who had never hunted, never shot: couldn't tell coulter from plough-handle and lived in his bowler hat! . . . A "sound" man: the archetype of all sound men. Never in his life had anyone shaken his head at Mark and said: "You're _brilliant_!" Brilliant! That stick! No, he was indispensable! "Upon my soul!" Tietjens said to himself, "that girl down there is the only intelligent living soul I've met for years." . . . A little pronounced in manner sometimes; faulty in reasoning naturally, but quite intelligent, with a touch of wrong accent now and then. But if she was wanted anywhere, there she'd be! Of good stock, of course: on both sides! . . . But, positively, she and Sylvia were the only two human beings he had met for years whom he could respect: the one for sheer efficiency in killing: the other for having the constructive desire and knowing how to set about it. Kill or cure! The two functions of man. If you wanted something killed you'd go to Sylvia Tietjens in the sure faith that she would kill it: emotion: hope: ideal: kill it quick and sure. If you wanted something kept alive you'd go to Valentine: she'd find something to do for it . . . The two types of mind: remorseless enemy: sure screen: dagger . . . sheath! Perhaps the future of the world then was to women? Why not? He hadn't in years met a man that he hadn't to talk down to--as you talk down to a child: as he had talked down to General Campion or to Mr. Waterhouse . . . as he always talked down to Macmaster. All good fellows in their way. . . . But why was he born to be a sort of lonely buffalo: outside the herd? Not artist: not soldier: not bureaucrat: not certainly indispensable anywhere: apparently not even sound in the eyes of these dim-minded specialists . . . An exact observer. . . . Hardly even that for the last six and a half hours: "Die Sommer Nacht hat mirs angethan Das war ein schweigsams Reiten . . ." he said aloud.