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real earnest. We of this town, who have just dedicated our first postwar plan for a BETTER BROWDLEY, can feel especially proud, for our own achievement makes us part of a mighty movement in which men of goodwill all over the world are straining to participate.
    (A pretty fair example, incidentally, of George’s editorial writing—typical, at any rate, in its use of capitals, in its opening metaphor that almost gets out of hand, and in its tendency to glib phrases. Typical also of George’s fondness for linking local and world affairs into a pleasing dish of optimism.)
    But now, reading it over, he had difficulty in gathering what it was all about. Disarmament? Disarmament ?…The word echoed meaninglessly in his mind as he sought, even for a moment, to concentrate on something nonpersonal. What did he know about disarmament? And at the form of that question he smiled, because of the oddest recollection that came to him there and then, as he crossed the printing office to the door leading into Market Street.
    It was of something that had happened several years before, when he had just acquired the almost bankrupt Guardian and was full of visions of the kind of influence a small-town paper could wield, perhaps even nationally, if its editor were the right sort, and surely the right sort must be well-educated, which surely in its turn could mean nothing less than a university degree. So that had become one of his numerous ambitions, and since Oxford and Cambridge were out of the question for a man who had a job to do, he had concentrated on a near-by provincial foundation of decent repute that offered degrees by examination only. It had been a hard struggle, even so, for he had originally left school at the age of thirteen, and though the following decade and a half had contained a good deal of self-education there were many deplorable gaps. He could write and speak forcefully, for instance, but before beginning to study he had scarcely heard of the technicalities of grammar, he had small knowledge of history, and none at all of any foreign language. At the first of the two necessary examinations he was baffled by the academic atmosphere, by the courtesy bordering on indifference of the pedagogue in charge (so unlike the nagging, shouting schoolmasters of his boyhood days), and he was rather dashed by an English paper which, though offering the most generous choice of questions, could not avoid the discovery of so much that he did not know. To one question, couched in that very phrase—“What do you know of the Pathetic Fallacy?”—he had replied, pathetically enough: “Nothing”; and there were other matters nearly as hopeless. Leaving the examination hall after that three-hour battle he had been fairly certain of failure.
    But a few weeks later he received a note asking him to appear at the same place for oral questioning—which, he was cautioned, did not necessarily imply that he had passed the written tests. The coolness of the warning reinforced his pessimism, so that he was in a thoroughly black mood by the time he faced the ordeal. A tall, thin, spectacled man with a domelike forehead and very precise clipped speech presided at the interview. (Ever afterwards he was the personification of an ideal in George’s mind—the pure scholar, unworldly, incomparable, serenely aloof; so that on meeting Lord Winslow, for instance, he felt he already knew the type.)
    The prototype had talked pleasantly and informally with George’s examination papers before him, and also (though George had not known this) notes of reminder that the examinee was thirty-one years old, had had nothing but an elementary-school education, but was already owner and editor of a local newspaper as well as a town Councillor with reputedly advanced views—altogether a rather remarkable specimen. Clearly George both puzzled and attracted him, though he gave no sign of it; he merely steered the conversation from one subject to another—which was