The picture grew before me. I could see them at the booking-office. I could see her fumbling in her bag, searching every pocket, and then turning to him with a despairing look. “I’ve lost the money.” “Oh, no; surely not,” he would say. “It must be in one of your pockets. Have another look.” And she would make another long, careful search which would, of course, be equally vain. And she would turn to him with tear-filled eyes. “But what am I to do? I can’t get home. I haven’t any money to buy a ticket.” And in her voice would be the suggestion that he should lend her some, and, of course, he would say that he had none with him, but that if she would come back to his flat.... And she would thank him effusively and they would leap into a taxi, but when they arrived at the flat, which would be at the top of four flights of stairs, with the flat below unoccupied, he would discover that he had no money after all, and that the porter had gone, and that there was no one from whom he could borrow any; she would sink down on the sofa, her hands clasped before her knees, while he stood behind her wondering at what exact point---- But at that moment the train stopped at East Croydon, where I had to change and wait twenty minutes for a connection; and, while I stamped up and down the platform trying to keep warm, a swift dissatisfaction with my story overcame me. What did it matter what he said next, or at what exact point he ... for whatever he did, or whatever she did, the story as I had elected to tell it could only end in one way--a row of dots, and a short concluding paragraph: “Next morning, her dark hair scattered across the pillow, she woke in a strange room....” And how often that has been done. In how many novels has not that dark hair been scattered across that pillow? It was theatrical, vulgar, the sort of plot that occurs to one as one sits in the smoking-room of one’s club after a heavy lunch and half a bottle of Pommard, and I walked up and down the platform of East Croydon station in a state of cold and miserable self-contempt. But warmth revives us, and when I was again in the corner-seat of a smoker, down the window of which the heat ran in long, straggly trickles, I began to think that, after all, though I had to wash out the seduction motive, there might be something in the idea of the lost return-ticket, and the last train to Anerley. Suppose now that the young man had for a long time besieged unsuccessfully his fair companion, and that on the refusal of his third proposal he had decided that he would never secure the hand of his beloved unless he managed to compromise innocently her honour? Yes, that might work out. He would steal her money at the restaurant; they would reach the booking-office where the scene which I have already described would be enacted. There would be the return to the flat and the discovery that the porter was out, and that, after all, he had forgotten to cash the cheque he had written out that morning.