There was no doubt about it.  A curious happiness pervaded his entire being.  He felt young and active.  Everything was emphatically for the best in this best of all possible worlds.  The sun was shining.  Even the sound of someone in the street below whistling one of his old compositions, of which he had heartily sickened twelve months before, was pleasant to his ears, and this in spite of the fact that the unseen whistler only touched the key in odd spots and had a poor memory for tunes.  George sprang lightly out of bed, and turned on the cold tap in the bath-room.  While he lathered his face for its morning shave he beamed at himself in the mirror.

It had come at last.  The Real Thing.

George had never been in love before.  Not really in love.  True, from the age of fifteen, he had been in varying degrees of intensity attracted sentimentally by the opposite sex.  Indeed, at that period of life of which Mr. Booth Tarkington has written so searchingly—­the age of seventeen—­he had been in love with practically every female he met and with dozens whom he had only seen in the distance; but ripening years had mellowed his taste and robbed him of that fine romantic catholicity.  During the last five years women had found him more or less cold.  It was the nature of his profession that had largely brought about this cooling of the emotions.  To a man who, like George, has worked year in and year out at the composition of musical comedies, woman comes to lose many of those attractive qualities which ensnare the ordinary male.  To George, of late years, it had begun to seem that the salient feature of woman as a sex was her disposition to kick.  For five years he had been wandering in a world of women, many of them beautiful, all of them superficially attractive, who had left no other impress on his memory except the vigour and frequency with which they had kicked.  Some had kicked about their musical numbers, some about their love-scenes; some had grumbled about their exit lines, others about the lines of their second-act frocks.  They had kicked in a myriad differing ways—­wrathfully, sweetly, noisily, softly, smilingly, tearfully, pathetically and patronizingly; but they had all kicked; with the result that woman had now become to George not so much a flaming inspiration or a tender goddess as something to be dodged—­tactfully, if possible; but, if not possible, by open flight.  For years he had dreaded to be left alone with a woman, and had developed a habit of gliding swiftly away when he saw one bearing down on him.

The psychological effect of such a state of things is not difficult to realize.  Take a man of naturally quixotic temperament, a man of chivalrous instincts and a feeling for romance, and cut him off for five years from the exercise of those qualities, and you get an accumulated store of foolishness only comparable to an escape of gas in a sealed room or a cellarful of dynamite.  A flicker of a match, and there is an explosion.