“Is this the Majestic bus?” Mr. Prohack enquired of the driver.

“Well, it is if you like, sir,” the driver answered.

Mr. Prohack did like....

The Majestic was large and prim, resembling a Swiss hotel in its furniture, the language and composition of the menu, the dialect of the waiters; but it was about fifteen degrees colder than the highest hotel in Switzerland.  The dining-room was shaded with rose-shaded lamps and it susurrated with the polite whisperings of elegant couples and trios, and the entremet was cabinet pudding:  a fine display considering the depth of winter and of the off-season.

Mr. Prohack went off after dinner for a sharp walk in the east wind.  Solitude!  Blackness!  Night!  East wind in the bushes of gardens that shielded the facades of large houses!  Not a soul!  Not a policeman!  He descended precariously to the vast, smooth beach.  The sound of the sea!  Romance!  Mr. Prohack seemed to walk for miles, like Ozymandias, on the lone and level sands.  Then he fancied he descried a moving object.  He was not mistaken.  It approached him.  It became a man and a woman.  It became a man and a young woman arm-in-arm and soul-in-soul.  And there was nothing but the locked couple, and the sound of the invisible, immeasurable sea, and the east wind, and Mr. Prohack.  Romance thrilled through Mr. Prohack’s spine.

“So I said to him,” the man was saying to the young woman as the pair passed Mr. Prohack, “I said to him ‘I could do with a pint o’ that,’ I said.”

III

The next morning Mr. Prohack rose with alacrity from a hard bed, and was greeted in the hall by the manager of the hotel, an enormous, middle-aged, sun-burnt, jolly person in flannels and an incandescent blazer, who asked him about his interests in golf and hard-court tennis.  Mr. Prohack, steeped as he felt himself to be in strange romance, was prepared to be interested in these games, but the self-protective instinct warned him that since these games could not be played alone they would, if he indulged in them, bring him into contact with people who might prove tedious.  He therefore changed the conversation and asked whether he could have strawberry jam to his breakfast.  The manager’s face instantly changed, hardening to severity.  Was Mr. Prohack eccentric?  Did he desire to disturb the serene habits of the hotel?  The manager promised to see.  He did see, and announced that he was ‘afraid’ that Mr. Prohack could not have strawberry jam to his breakfast.  And Mr. Prohack said to himself:  “What would my son Charles have done?” During a solitary breakfast (with blackberry jam) in the huge dining-room, Mr. Prohack decided that Charles would have approached the manager differently.

After breakfast he saw the manager again, and he did not enquire from the manager whether there was any chance of hiring a motor-car.  He said briefly: