You must have been stopped at some time near the Adelphi by a burnt-up, middle-aged man who asks the way to a bar or a restaurant unknown to you. When you say you don't know it, a disappointed look creeps into his eyes, and he apologizes and goes off, very straight and lonely, in the crowd. Conrad in quest of his youth? Perhaps. Possibly for years, while he waited for leave, he was promising himself a visit to this place. No doubt the stars saw him sitting out alone at night thinking of it, hearing the thunder of the Strand, seeing its lights, and himself slipping into his old seat at a corner table where he used to sit with old X, who was killed in "British East." ... All the time the Strand was altering, denying such exiles their beloved landmarks. * * * So they drift a little sadly and disconsolately along the Strand, feeling as you feel when, after a long absence, you visit a place known to you when you were a child. Nothing is so big as you thought, nothing so impressive as once it was. That tiny paddock was once a prairie--that small house a castle. The Strand to them is somehow different--cheaper, smaller, vaguely disappointing. Those pale-faced men hurrying along. How strange. What an altered atmosphere! And where are those lovely little faces that used to look from beneath Merry Widow hats? * * * Then, six months after, in a solitude of stars and palms, with a hot wind blowing over the plains: "O Lord, to see the dear old Strand now!" The big stars shine, the moon swings up above the distant hills, and the old love comes back into the heart of the lonely man.... Women and Tea A tea-shop is a delightful place. It is the milestone that marks the end of a day's work. In the provinces, and particularly in the north and in Scotland, where men take tea with passionate sincerity, frequently starting with sardines and ending with apple tart, the tea-shop occupies an appropriately massive position in daily life. London's tea-shops are, however, talk-shops, refuges from a day's shopping, trysting-places after a terrible eight hours' separation. O, the eyes that meet over a muffin every afternoon in London; the hands that thrill to a casual touch beneath the crumpet plate.... London's tea-shops are of many kinds, from the standardized shop to the good pull-up for millionaires constructed on the Paris plan, where slim Gruyère sandwiches hide in paper coats, and cakes taste of Benedictine, and bills have a queer habit of working out at fifteen shillings.