One envies, sometimes, the people who were born a hundred years ago. It must have been so easy to write then, when all the plots were new and there were so few writers. To-day everyone is writing novels. One is cultivating a soil that has yielded many harvests. One begins a story: for a week, a month, a fortnight one is happy and excited, and then one loses interest suddenly. It is _vieux jeu_, one says. It has all been done so many times before. One is not good enough to make an old thing new. Or, again, it may be that one can find no ending to a story, an ending that has not become banal through other people’s exploitation of it. This, for instance, this scene in a Soho restaurant: a small, unobtrusive, unsensational, but very excellent foreign restaurant in Dean Street, where I used to dine occasionally, in days when I had a bungalow beneath the Downs, after a day’s football, before the last train down to Sussex, when I was tired, when I did not want to be disturbed by music and noise and laughter, when I wanted my eyes to rest on quiet wallpaper and quiet dresses, when I knew exactly what I wanted, and exactly where to find it; there: this one dramatic episode of which it has been my fortune to be a witness. I had only just taken my seat and begun my examination of the menu when the double-doors of the restaurant swung open and a young girl paused there in the doorway, looking round her with the expression of perplexed embarrassment that the faces of young people assume in a strange place. She made a pretty picture as she stood there, a fur cap fitting tightly over the head, pressing the brown hair into a thick wave about her ears; a small hand raised towards the throat, keeping in its place the woollen scarf that was flung across the shoulder; a slim ankle protruding beneath her skirt, a “tweazy” looking little thing; and if her features were not beautiful, she had the prettiness of all young girls whose figures are slim and graceful--the charm of the green leaf and the bud, that fascinates a man more than beauty does, but that passes quickly and lasts rarely into womanhood. She stood there, looking round her for a moment, then the perplexed expression left her; she smiled and walked down the centre of the room. A man rose from a table in the corner and came to meet her. He was one of those men whom it is almost impossible to describe, so much did he resemble the rest of his sex in his dress, his manner, and the general carriage of his person. He looked, and probably was, a gentleman; he was about thirty years old; he had a small dark moustache, and he showed no signs of baldness. Beyond that I could tell nothing. He was hidden in complete security behind the technique of an upbringing.