He reached Piccadilly and turned westwards.  And then, as he passed the gates of the In and Out Club, he had a moment of clear vision and understood everything.  He was depressed because he was bored, and he was bored because he was lonely.  Mac, that solid thinker, had been right.  The solution of the problem of life was to get hold of the right girl and have a home to go back to at night.  He was mildly surprised that he had tried in any other direction for an explanation of his gloom.  It was all the more inexplicable in that fully 80 per cent of the lyrics which he had set in the course of his musical comedy career had had that thought at the back of them.

George gave himself up to an orgy of sentimentality.  He seemed to be alone in the world which had paired itself off into a sort of seething welter of happy couples.  Taxicabs full of happy couples rolled by every minute.  Passing omnibuses creaked beneath the weight of happy couples.  The very policeman across the Street had just grinned at a flitting shop girl, and she had smiled back at him.  The only female in London who did not appear to be attached was a girl in brown who was coming along the sidewalk at a leisurely pace, looking about her in a manner that suggested that she found Piccadilly a new and stimulating spectacle.

As far as George could see she was an extremely pretty girl, small and dainty, with a proud little tilt to her head and the jaunty walk that spoke of perfect health.  She was, in fact, precisely the sort of girl that George felt he could love with all the stored-up devotion of an old buffer of twenty-seven who had squandered none of his rich nature in foolish flirtations.  He had just begun to weave a rose-tinted romance about their two selves, when a cold reaction set in.  Even as he paused to watch the girl threading her way through the crowd, the east wind jabbed an icy finger down the back of his neck, and the chill of it sobered him.  After all, he reflected bitterly, this girl was only alone because she was on her way somewhere to meet some confounded man.  Besides there was no earthly chance of getting to know her.  You can’t rush up to pretty girls in the street and tell them you are lonely.  At least, you can, but it doesn’t get you anywhere except the police station.  George’s gloom deepened—­a thing he would not have believed possible a moment before.  He felt that he had been born too late.  The restraints of modern civilization irked him.  It was not, he told himself, like this in the good old days.

In the Middle Ages, for example, this girl would have been a Damsel; and in that happy time practically everybody whose technical rating was that of Damsel was in distress and only too willing to waive the formalities in return for services rendered by the casual passer-by.  But the twentieth century is a prosaic age, when girls are merely girls and have no troubles at all.  Were he to stop this girl in brown and assure her that his aid and comfort were at her disposal, she would undoubtedly call that large policeman from across the way, and the romance would begin and end within the space of thirty seconds, or, if the policeman were a quick mover, rather less.