The Colonel looked away.
Joe eyed him shrewdly.
"Last time you were asked to, you refused," he remarked. "Said you'd resign rather. One General said if there was war he'd fight against England. It was a piece in the Daily Telegraph. A've got it pasted in ma Ammunition Book. Coom in and see!"
The Colonel did not move.
"I think the officers will be there or thereabouts all right if the're wanted," he said.
Joe appeared slightly mollified.
"Well, you came out against the railway-men in 1911," he said. "A will say that for you. A wasn't sure you'd feel same gate when it coom to Emperors."
They strolled back together to Pevensey Road; and for the first time the Colonel actively disliked the man at his side. That wind of the spirit which had blown through the engineer yesterday purging him of his dross had passed on into the darkness. To-day he was both politically dishonest and sexually unclean.
In fact his life that had been rushing down the mountain like a spate with extraordinary speed and power, confined between narrow banks, just as it was emerging at the estuary into the sea had met suddenly the immense weight of the returning ocean-tide, advancing irresistible—to be swamped, diverted, turned back on itself. This man once so strong, of single purpose, and not to be deflected from it by any human power, was now spiritually for all his bluff a tumbling mass of worry and confusion and dirty yellow foam....
The pair had passed into the main thoroughfare.