Then, as his mind cleared momentarily, he became aware of the stout-laden east wind of hostility that blew around him. Em­barrassed and scared, he jumped up from his seat and went over to join the dense crowd round the bar. The landlord and his two daughters were working hard filling glasses and taking money, but he never seemed to get any nearer to being served. Several times he edged his way to the bar, waiting until all those before him had been attended to, but always he was curtly thrust aside just as he opened his mouth to give his order. After twenty minutes all the ebullience he had derived from the whisky and the cigarette had been drained away, and all he felt was the fatigue of standing for so long after a day without proper food. Deter­minedly he held his glass out and rapped it on the counter. ‘Gin, please,’ he shrilled. ‘Four bitters, a Guinness, three rolls, and Martha says have you got ’ny Weights?’ rapped out a stocky man at his side. Charles turned on him fiercely. ‘Just a minute,’ he snapped, ‘I was here long before you.’ The man looked at him coldly for an instant, but before he could reply, his order, com­plete with a packet of cigarettes, was handed to him on a tray, and he rapidly counted out the required money and departed. Charles sank to the bottom of an Atlantic of frustration. It was obvious, even to a mind dulled, like his, by exhaustion and disappointment, why he was getting nowhere. This establishment, or at any rate this particular room of it, was predominantly working class in atmosphere; consequently it was peopled by raw, angular personalities who had been encouraged by life to develop their sharp edges. His sharp edges, on the other hand, had been systematically blunted by his upbringing and education. From the nursery onwards, he had been taught to modulate the natural loudness of his voice, to efface himself in every possible way, to defer to others. And this was the result! He had been equipped with an upbringing devised to meet the needs of a more fortunate age, and then thrust into the jungle of the nineteen-fifties. The hive was full of wasps, all workers and all identical; but he, who differed from the others in nothing else, had been deprived of his sting.