Every value was changed according to a fresh standard, as in a
shipwreck. For a week George had felt an actual physical weight in the
stomach. This weight was his own selfish woe, but it was also the woe of
the entire friendly world. Every architect knew and said that the
profession of architecture would be ruined for years. Then the India
Office woke George up. The attitude of the India Office was overbearing.
It implied that it had been marvellously original and virtuous in
submitting the affair of its barracks to even a limited competition,
when it might just as easily have awarded the job to any architect whom
it happened to know, or whom its wife, cousin, or aunt happened to know,
or whose wife, cousin, or aunt happened to know the India Office--and
further, that George ought therefore to be deeply grateful. It said that
in view of the war the barracks must be erected with the utmost
possible, or rather with quite impossible, dispatch, and that George
would probably have to go to India at once. Simultaneously it daily
modified George's accepted plans for the structure, exactly as though it
was a professional architect and George an amateur, and it involved him
in a seemly but intense altercation between itself and the subordinate
bureaucracy of a Presidency. It kept George employed.
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