John Bull's other Island by George Bernard Shaw

Great George Street, Westminster, is the address of Doyle and / Broadbent, civil engineers. On the threshold one reads that the / firm consists of Mr Lawrence Doyle and Mr Thomas Broadbent, and / that their rooms are on the first floor. Most of their rooms are / private; for the partners, being bachelors and bosom friends, / live there; and the door marked Private, next the clerks' office, / is their domestic sitting room as well as their reception room / for clients. Let me describe it briefly from the point of view of / a sparrow on the window sill. The outer door is in the opposite / wall, close to the right hand corner. Between this door and the / left hand corner is a hatstand and a table consisting of large / drawing boards on trestles, with plans, rolls of tracing paper, / mathematical instruments and other draughtsman's accessories on / it. In the left hand wall is the fireplace, and the door of an / inner room between the fireplace and our observant sparrow. / Against the right hand wall is a filing cabinet, with a cupboard / on it, and, nearer, a tall office desk and stool for one person. / In the middle of the room a large double writing table is set / across, with a chair at each end for the two partners. It is a / room which no woman would tolerate, smelling of tobacco, and much / in need of repapering, repainting, and recarpeting; but this is / the effect of bachelor untidiness and indifference, not want of / means; for nothing that Doyle and Broadbent themselves have / purchased is cheap; nor is anything they want lacking. On the / walls hang a large map of South America, a pictorial advertisement / of a steamship company, an impressive portrait of Gladstone, and / several caricatures of Mr Balfour as a rabbit and Mr Chamberlain / as a fox by Francis Carruthers Gould.

At twenty minutes to five o'clock on a summer afternoon in 1904, / the room is empty. Presently the outer door is opened, and a / valet comes in laden with a large Gladstone bag, and a strap of / rugs. He carries them into the inner room. He is a respectable / valet, old enough to have lost all alacrity, and acquired an air / of putting up patiently with a great deal of trouble and / indifferent health. The luggage belongs to Broadbent, who enters / after the valet. He pulls off his overcoat and hangs it with his / hat on the stand. Then he comes to the writing table and looks / through the letters which are waiting for him. He is a robust, / full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life, sometimes eager / and credulous, sometimes shrewd and roguish, sometimes portentously / solemn, sometimes jolly and impetuous, always buoyant and irresistible, / mostly likeable, and enormously absurd in his most earnest moments. / He bursts open his letters with his thumb, and glances through them, / flinging the envelopes about the floor with reckless untidiness / whilst he talks to the valet.