Publisher's Synopsis
At half-past two of a sunny, sultry afternoon late in the month of August, Mr. Benjamin Staffsat at table in the dining-room of the Authors' Club, moodily munching a morsel of cheeseand a segment of cast-iron biscuit and wondering what he must do to be saved from thedeath-in-life of sheer ennui.A long, lank gentleman, surprisingly thin, of a slightly saturnine cast: he was not onlyunhappy, he looked it. He was alone and he was lonely; he was an American and a man ofsentiment (though he didn't look that) and he wanted to go home; to sum up, he foundhimself in love and in London at one and the same time, and felt precisely as ill at ease inthe one as in the other of these, to him, exotic circumstances.Inconceivable as it may seem that any rational man should yearn for New York in August, that and nothing less was what Staff wanted with all his heart. He wanted to go home andswelter and be swindled by taxicab drivers and snubbed by imported head-waiters; hewanted to patronise the subway at peril of asphyxiation and to walk down Fifth Avenue atthat witching hour when electric globes begin to dot the dusk of evening-pale moons of aworld of steel and stone; he wanted to ride in elevators instead of lifts, in trolley-carsinstead of trams; he wanted to go to a ball-game at the Polo Grounds, to dine dressed as hepleased, to insult his intelligence with a roof-garden show if he felt so disposed, and to seefor himself just how much of Town had been torn down in the two months of his exile andwhat they were going to put up in its place. He wanted, in short, his own people; morespecifically he wanted just one of them, meaning to marry her if she'd have him.Now to be homesick and lovesick all at once is a tremendously disturbing state of affairs. Soinfluenced, the strongest men are prone to folly. Staff, for instance, had excellent reason todoubt the advisability of leaving London just then, with an unfinished play on his hands;but he was really no more than a mere, normal human being, and he did want very badly togo home. If it was a sharp struggle, it was a short one that prefaced his decision.Of a sudden he rose, called for his bill and paid it, called for his hat and stick, got them, andresolutely-yet with a furtive air, as one who would throw a dogging conscience off thescent-fled the premises of his club, shaping a course through Whitehall and Charing Crossto Cockspur Street, where, with the unerring instinct of a homing pigeon, he dodged hastilyinto the booking-office of a steamship company.Now Mystery is where one finds it, and Romantic Adventure is as a rule to be come uponinfesting the same identical premises