He simply did not comprehend that all these events were negligible trifles, that no American correspondent had seen the hundredth part of the enemy forces, that the troops which marched through Brussels were a tiny, theatrical side-show, a circus, that the attack on Liége had been mismanaged, that the great battle at Dinant was a mere skirmish in the new scale of war, and the engagements with Uhlans mere scuffles, and that behind the screen of these infinitesimal phenomena _the German army_, unimagined in its hugeness, horror, and might, was creeping like a fatal and monstrous caterpillar surely towards France. A similar screen hid from him the realities of England. He saw bunting and recruits, and the crowds outside consulates. But he had no idea of the ceaseless flight of innumerable crammed trains day and night southwards, of the gathering together of Atlantic liners and excursion steamers from all the coasts into an unprecedented Armada, of the sighting of the vanguard of that Armada by an incredulous Boulogne, of the landing of British regiments and guns and aeroplanes in the midst of a Boulogne wonderstruck and delirious, and of the thrill which thereupon ecstatically shivered through France. He knew only that 'the Expeditionary Force had landed in safety.' He could not believe that a British Army could face successfully the legendary Prussians with their Great General Staff, and yet he had a mystic and entirely illogical belief in the invincibility of the British Army. He had read somewhere that the German forces amounted in all to the equivalent of over three hundred divisions; he had been reliably told that the British forces in France amounted to three divisions and some cavalry. It was most absurd; but his mysticism survived the absurdity, so richly was it nourished by news from the strange, inartistic colonies, where architecture was not understood. Revelation came to George that the British Empire, which he had always suspected to be an invention of those intolerable persons the Imperialists, was after all something more than a crude pink smear across the map of the world. Withal he was acutely dejected as he left his office to go to the club. II Sir Isaac was sitting quite alone in the large smoking-room of the Artists in Albemarle Street--a beautiful apartment terribly disfigured by its pictures, which had been procured from fashionable members in the fashionable taste of twenty years earlier, and were crying aloud for some one brave enough to put them out of their misery. No interpretation of the word 'artist' could by any ingenuity be stretched to include Sir Isaac. Nevertheless he belonged to the club, and so did a number of other men in like case. The difference between Sir Isaac and the rest was that Sir Isaac did actually buy pictures, though seldom from fashionable painters.