His days were steadfastly regular and steadfastly monotonous. Each morning by half-past eight he was seated in the office in the Rue Ernest Dupont; in a roomy house, most provincially French, built round a paved courtyard and entered from the street by an archway. A projecting board at the side of the archway bore the accumulation of letters which denoted the department by which the house had been annexed, and on the door of the room where William laboured was the legend "Letters and Enquiries." At half-past twelve he knocked off for dinner and was his own master till three; then the office again till supper and after supper—with good luck till ten, with bad luck indefinite overtime. On Sundays he was his own master for the space of an afternoon, and now and again there were parades and now and again the "late pass" that entitled to an evening at liberty. When he first arrived he was fed and roofed in one of the camps on the borders of the little city; later, with half-a-dozen fellows, he slept and messed in the upper rooms of the building in which he did his daily work.... It was a life of bleak order and meticulous, safe regularity, poles apart from his civilian forecast of the doings of a man of war. There was small thrill of personal danger about its soldiering; the little city at the "Front" was far less exposed to the malice of enemies than London or the East Coast of England: and almost the only indication of possible peril was the occasional printed notice displayed in a citizen’s window to the effect that within was a cellar "at the disposition of the public in case of alarm"—from aircraft. Once or twice during the first year that William dwelt there the anti-aircraft section grew clamorous on its hills and spat loudly at specks in the blue—which, after a few minutes, receded to the east while the city settled down without injury. The men in the town and quartered in the camps outside it were for the most part office-workers, men of the A.S.C., of Labour companies or Veterinary service; to whom the monotony of daily existence was a deadlier foe than the German. * * * * * His life had been unusually clean; partly, no doubt, from inclination to cleanliness, but partly through influence of circumstance. While his mother lived he had small opportunity for dissipation even of the mildest variety; and hard on her death had come the great new interests which his friendship with Faraday opened to him. Those interests had been so engrossing that he had little energy to spare from them; all his hopes and pleasures were bound up in his "causes," and the very violence of his political enthusiasms had saved him from physical temptation. Thus he had come to Griselda heart-whole and sound, and, even when his causes and his wife were lost, the habit of years still clung to him and the follies that came easily to others would have needed an effort in him.