44 ANGEL PAVEMENT

of the type, The hard-boiled eye, the chiselled nose, the
severally controlled mouth, the masterful chin, all these
were missing, and in their place were ordinary mas-
culine English features, neither very good nor very bad,
very strong nor very weak. Mr. Dersingham was a year
or two under forty, tallish, fairly well-built but begin-
ning to sag a little; his hair, which was now rapidly
taking leave of him, was light brown, and his eyes light
blue, and they neither sparkled nor pierced but just
regarded the world blandly and amiably; he had re-
tained one of those short pruned moustaches that crept
under the noses of so many subalterns during the War;
and he looked clean, healthy and kind, but a trifle
flabby and none too intelligent. It was only after the
War, during which he had assisted, with rapidly
diminishing enthusiasm, one of the new battalions of
the Royal Fusiliers, that he had joined his uncle at
Twigg and Dersingham's. Before the War he had tried
various things with no particular success, though he
liked to suggest that the War had almost ruined his
prospects. (In strict fact, it had improved them, for his
uncle would never have taken him into the business,
and left it to him when he died, if he had not taken
pity on him as a returned hero.) It had been the inten-
tion of his parents to send Howard Bromport to Oxford
or Cambridge, but they had lost money suddenly and
Howard Bromport, no scholar, had failed to obtain a
scholarship, so he had been compelled to stroll into
business. In spirit, however, he went on to the univer-
sity, and thus he became one of those men who are
haunted by a lost Oxford or Cambridge career. These
are not the scholars or the brilliant athletes who have
been denied their chance of distinction, but simply the