The newspapers had been hot after him, and he knew not how to defend himself. His photograph was implored. He was waylaid by journalists shabby and by journalists spruce, and the resulting interviews made him squirm. He became a man of mark at Pickering's. Photographers entreated him to sit free of charge. What irritated him in the whole vast affair was the continual insistence upon his lack of years. Nobody seemed to be interested in his design for the town hall; everybody had the air of regarding him as a youthful prodigy, a performing animal. Personally he did not consider that he was so very young. (Nevertheless he did consider that he was a youthful prodigy. He could recall no architect in history who had done what he had done at his age.) The town clerk who travelled from the North to see him treated his age in a different manner, the patronizing. He did not care for the town clerk. However, the town clerk was atoned for by the chairman of the new town hall sub-committee, a true human being named Soulter, with a terrific accent and a taste for architecture, pictures, and music. Mr. Soulter, though at least forty-five, treated George, without any appearance of effort, as a coeval. George immediately liked him, and the mere existence of Mr. Soulter had the effect of dissipating nearly all George's horrible qualms and apprehensions about his own competence to face the overwhelming job of erection. Mr. Soulter was most soothing in the matter of specifications and contractors. "So you've got into your new room," said John Orgreave. Never before had he mounted to see George either in the new room or in the old room. The simple fact of the presence there of one of the partners in the historic firm below compensated for much teasing sarcasm and half-veiled jealousy. It was a sign. It was a seal authenticating renown. "Yes." "I only wanted to give you a message from Adela. The Ingram young woman is staying with us----" "Lois?" The name shot out of him unbidden. "Yes. You're humbly supplicated to go to tea to-day. Four o'clock. Thank God I've not forgotten it!" George arrived fifty-five minutes late at Bedford Park. Throughout the journey thither he kept repeating: "She said I should do it. And I've done it! I've done it! I've done it!" The triumph was still so close behind him that he was constantly realizing it afresh, and saying, wonder-struck: "I've done it." And the miraculous phantasm of the town hall, uplifted in solid stone, formed itself again and again in his enchanted mind, against a background of tremendous new ambitions rising endlessly one behind another like snowy alps. "Is this what you call four o'clock?" twittered Adela, between cajolery and protest, somewhat older and facially more artificial, but eternally blonde; still holding her fair head on one side and sinuously waving the palm. "Sorry! Sorry! I was kept at the last moment by a journalist johnny."