Publisher's Synopsis
At half-past two of a sunny, sultry afternoon late in the month of August, Mr.Benjamin Staff sat at table in the dining-room of the Authors' Club, moodily munching amorsel of cheese and a segment of cast-iron biscuit and wondering what he must do tobe saved from the death-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 manof sentiment (though he didn't look that) and he wanted to go home; to sum up, hefound himself in love and in London at one and the same time, and felt precisely as ill atease in the one as in the other of these, to him, exotic circumstances.
