It was somewhat late in the evening when I arrived in London. I had meant to sleep at a large new hotel in the Strand, but I felt tired, and I suddenly, on the spur of the moment, decided to stay at the Grand Junction, if there was space for me. It is thus that Fate works. I walked into the hall, followed by a platform porter with my bag. The place seemed just as usual, the perfection of the commonplace, the business-like, and the unspiritual. “Have you a room?” I asked the young lady in black, whose yellow hair shone gaily at the office window under the electric light. She glanced at her ledgers in the impassive and detached manner which hotel young ladies with yellow hair invariably affect, and ejaculated: “No. 221.” “Pity you couldn’t make it all twos,” I ventured, with timid jocularity. (How could I guess the import of what I was saying?) She smiled very slightly, with a distant condescension. It is astonishing the skill with which a feminine hotel clerk can make a masculine guest feel small and self-conscious. “Name?” she demanded. “Edge.” “Fourth floor,” she said, writing out the room-ticket and handing it to me. In another moment I was in the lift. No. 221 was the last door but one at the end of the eastern corridor of the fourth floor. It proved to be a double-bedded room, large, exquisitely ugly, but perfectly appointed in all matters of comfort; in short, it was characteristic of the hotel. I knew that every bedroom in that corridor, and every bedroom in every corridor, presented exactly the same aspect. One instinctively felt the impossibility of anything weird, anything bizarre, anything terrible, entering the precincts of an abode so solid, cheerful, orderly, and middle-class. And yet--but I shall come to that presently.