"Now about this work of yours. I've looked at it with some care——" His speech was like his demeanour and his finger-nails.
"Boor!" thought George. But he could not actively resent the slight. He glanced round at the walls; he was in a prison. He was at the mercy of a tyrant invested with omnipotence.
The little tyrant, however, was superficially affable. Only now and then in his prim, courteous voice was there a hint of hostility and cruelty. He put a number of questions, the answers to which had to be George's justification. He said "H'm!" and "Ah!" and "Really?" He came to the matter of spouting.
"Now, I object to hopper-heads," he said. "I regard them as unhygienic."
And he looked coldly at George with eyebrows lifted. George returned the gaze.
"I know you do, sir," George replied.
Indeed it was notorious that hopper-heads to vertical spouting were a special antipathy of the examiner's; he was a famous faddist. But the reply was a mistake. The examiner, secure in his attributes, ignored the sally. A little later, taking up the general plan of the town hall, he said:
"The fact is, I do—not—care for this kind of thing. The whole tendency——-"
"Excuse me, sir," George interrupted, with conscious and elaborate respectfulness. "But surely the question isn't one of personal preferences. Is the design good or is it bad?"
"Well, I call it bad," said the examiner, showing testiness. The examiner too could be impulsive, was indeed apt to be short-tempered. The next instant he seized one of the brilliant perspective sketches, and by his mere manner of