It couldn’t be done. And so, his tie duly tied by the clumsy-fingered man who had received lessons from a shop in the Burlington Arcade, the gallant Peter left his rooms in Park Place and stood on the curb in St. James’s Street. Should he walk or drive? Should he try to raise a friend equally at a loose end, or carry on alone? How he missed his dear old father, who, until the day of his peaceful death, was always ready to join him in a cheery dinner at the Marlborough or the Orleans or at one of the hotels where he could see the pretty girls. After all, dining at the Savoy was not such a lonely proceeding as it seemed. Among the profiteers and the new rich there might be a familiar face. And there was at any rate an orchestra. With a dump hat at an angle of forty-five and a light overcoat over his dinner jacket, he was a mark for all the prowling cabs which found business worse than usual. Two or three of them knew this tall wiry man and had served in his Division. One of the youngest of the Brigadier Generals in the British Army, he had worn his brass hat as though it were the cap of a man with one pip; they loved him for that and any day and any night would cheerfully have followed him to hell. Many of them had called him “Beauty Chalfont,” which had made him uncomfortable. It was better than “Bloody” Chalfont or “Butcher” Chalfont,—adjectives that had been rather too freely applied to some of his brother Brigadiers. So far as the majority of passers-by were concerned, this man to whom willing hands had gone up in salute and who had turned out to be a born soldier was, like so many demobilized officers all over the country, of no account, a nobody, his name and his services forgotten. The pre-war cheeriness which had belonged to the Savoy was absent now. Chorus ladies and Guards officers, baby-faced foreign office clerks and members of the Bachelors, famous artists and dramatists and the ubiquitous creatures who put together the musical potpourris of the town, beautiful ladies of doubtful reputation and highly respectable ones without quite so much beauty no longer jostled the traveling Americans, tennis-playing Greeks and Indian rajahs in the foyer. Chalfont marched in to find the place filled with wrongly dressed men with plebeian legs and strange women who seemed to have been dug out of the residential end of factory cities. Their pearls and diamonds were almost enough to stir Bolshevism in the souls of curates.