“Albemarle Road—­don’t you want Albemarle Road?” the conductress was asking me.  She spoke very loudly.

“Pontresina—­I’m Pontresina,” I answered.

“This is Albemarle Road.  If you’re going on it’ll be another penny,” she insisted.

I rose in bewilderment.

St. Ives was looking at me while she knitted.  I raised my hat to her and smiled.  We had been such good friends all the evening—­how could I ever forget it?  But she did not smile; she only stared.  She seemed to think I was mad.  Macclesfield was reading his Star just as if he had never hurled himself on to the top of the ’bus.  The flapper was squinting at herself in a little pocket-mirror; she looked contemptuously at me as I passed.  Old York was half asleep.  One would think they had never been rushing about in that frantic General Post.  And we were all inside the car again.

It was odd!

* * * * *

[Illustration:  “THE BLOKE WOT PAINTED THAT KNEW ‘OW TO DO A BIT O’ FOOD ’OARDING, DIDN’T ’E?”]

* * * * *

’TWAS FIFTY YEARS AGO.

(Lines suggested by an old Magazine.)

  Published the year I went to school—­
    The second of life’s seven ages—­
  How fragrant of Victorian rule
    Are these forgotten pages! 
  When meat and fruit were still uncanned;
    When good CHARLES DICKENS still was writing;
  And SWINBURNE’S poetry was banned
    As rather too exciting.

  No murmurs of impending strife
    Were heard, no dark suggestions hinted;
  Our novelists still looked on life
    Through spectacles rose-tinted;
  And Paris, in those giddy years,
    Still laughed at OFFENBACH and SCHNEIDER,
  Blind to the doom of blood and tears,
    With none to warn or guide her.

  The index and the authors’ names,
    Their stories and their lucubrations,
  Recall old literary aims
    And faded reputations;
  We wonder at the influence
    That SALA’S florid periods had on
  His fellows, and the vogue immense
    Of versatile Miss BRADDON.

  And yet I read Aurora Floyd
    In youth with rapture quite unholy—­
  Not in the way that I enjoyed
    Mince-pies or roly-poly;
  While “G.A.S.” appeared to me
    Like a Leonid fresh from starland,
  Not the young lion that we see
    Portrayed in Friendship’s Garland.

  And there are tinklings of the lute
    In orthodox decorous fashion,
  But altogether destitute
    Of “elemental” passion;
  And illustrations which refrain
    From all that verges on the shady,
  But glorify the whiskered swain,
    The lachrymose young lady.

  The sirens of the “sixties” showed
    No inkling of our modern Circes,
  And swells had not evolved the code
    That guides our precious Percys;
  Woman, in short, was grave or gay,
    But not a problem or a riddle,
  And maidens still were taught to play
    The harp and not the fiddle.