glare, the kaleidoscopic movement, and the concentrated excitement of
Piccadilly Circus. Then he sauntered through Leicester Square and
began to drift northward. The gas torches outside places of
entertainment had arrested his slow progress. One of the music-halls
in the Square appeared to him as iniquitously gorgeous, and he gazed
through the wide entrance at the vestibule hall, and staircase. The
whole thing was as fine as one might have expected inside Buckingham
Palace or the Mansion House--crimson curtains, marble steps, golden
balusters, and flunkeys wearing velvet breeches and silk stockings. It
grieved him momentarily to discover that two giant commissionnaires
were both foreigners. He heard them address each other with a rapid
guttural jabber. "Should 'a' thought there's large-sized men enough in
England, if you troubled to look for 'em."

To this point he had amused himself sufficiently; but each night as
he turned his face toward the Euston Road, his spirits sank and the
same queer mixture of bodily and mental discomfort attacked him. It
began with the slightly bitter thought of being "out of it." He looked
disapprovingly at pallid and puffed young swells gliding past in cabs;
at the humbler folk who hurried by without seeming to be aware of his
existence, who bumped into him and never said "Pardon!"; at the
painted women of the narrower pavements--more foreigners half of
them--who leered and murmured.

"Where's the police?" He asked himself the question indignantly and
contemptuously. "Can't they see what's going on under their noses? Or
don't they _wish_ to see it? Or have they been paid _not_ to see it?
Funny thing if every respectable married man is to be bothered like
this--three times in fifty yards!"

These incessant solicitations affected his nerves. So much so, indeed,
that he cursed the impudence of one woman and called her a rude name.
She did not seem to mind. While he was still in the generous afterglow
produced by a bit of plain-speaking, another one had t

William Babington Maxwell (18661938) was a British novelist. He was a son of novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Though nearly 50 years old at the outbreak of the First World War, he was accepted as a lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers and served in France until 1917.

Cyrus Townsend Brady (December 20, 1861 January 24, 1920) was a journalist, historian and adventure writer. His most well-known work is Indian Fights and Fighters. He was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1883. He was also a deacon in the Episcopal church. His first wife was Clarissa Guthrie, who died in 1890. His second wife was Mary Barrett.

Rebecca Sophia Clarke (1833-1906), also known as Sophie May, was an American author of childrens fiction. Using her nieces and nephews as inspiration, she wrote realistic stories about children. She wrote 45 books between 1860 and 1903. The most popular being the Little Prudy books. She lived most of her life in her native town of Norridgewock, Maine, where she lived out her life with her sister, who was also a successful author.