“Oh, damn the travellers,” pronounced Peter. “They’re no good for this sort of job. We’ll have to do it ourselves.” * * * * * He took the Tube as far as Oxford Circus; walked slowly down Regent Street into Piccadilly Circus. All about him lights blazed, motors thrummed and hooted, people jostled. London, London as she was towards the end of the Great Peace! London,—tango-dancing, theatre-going, night-clubbing London! London! City of the seven millions, where—scum that floated upwards, glistening, utterly useless—loose women and vicious politicians, emasculate authors and popularity-hunting actors, rag-time dancers and company-promoters, preened and bloated, spent and gambled, fooling away the night-time. Yet London—for all this scum that fed upon her fineness—solid at heart, worthy if deceptive capital of an Empire compared with whose achievements Rome was a weakling and Athens a nonentity. But Peter Jameson, worker, cared for none of these things! He looked up at the electric signs that winked and glinted on the darkness: at the “Paripan Paint” sign, and the two whirling clock-faces over Saqui and Lawrences’s, at the snaky twirls of “Oxo” and the high circles of “O. O.” Whisky. And he visioned—vaguely, for it was three years since his last visit—Broadway, New York: Rosbach’s burning fountain, “Owl” Cigars, “Anargyros” Cigarettes, the theatre lamps and the drugstore lamps. “They, the Americans, understood advertising; responded to it. Compared with them, we were only children,” thought Peter Jameson. “Confound it, why should the home-trade of Nirvana lag behind the export?” Then he glanced at the watch on his wrist; saw it was nearly half past seven; remembered—for the first time since leaving Lowndes Square in the morning—that he possessed a wife. PART TWO NIRVANA, LIMITED § 1 “Pretty” Bramson—black well-oiled hair, curled moustaches, blue eyes and general dapperness had earned the nickname when, as East County salesman for his cousin Marcus Bramson, owner of Bramson’s “Pulman” Virginias, he had first gone “on the road”—sat pensive in the sales-manager’s office of Nirvana Ltd., Manufacturers of High Grade Cigarettes. The room was large, well carpeted, glinting with mahogany. On the walls hung sales-charts, specimen advertisements for the Press, show cards—gaudy but efficient—for tobacconists’ windows. Through the thin partition, he heard the whirr of fly-wheels, subdued chatter of work-girls, Turkovitch’s voice raised in sharp expostulation, occasionally the thump which told him that the new “U.K.” machine—their fourth—was being swiftly erected. But “Pretty” Bramson thought only indirectly of Nirvana.