George awoke next morning with a misty sense that somehow the world

had changed. As the last remnants of sleep left him, he was aware

of a vague excitement. Then he sat up in bed with a jerk. He had

remembered that he was in love.

There was no doubt about it. A curious happiness pervaded his

entire being. He felt young and active. Everything was emphatically

for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The sun was

shining. Even the sound of someone in the street below whistling

one of his old compositions, of which he had heartily sickened

twelve months before, was pleasant to his ears, and this in spite

of the fact that the unseen whistler only touched the key in odd

spots and had a poor memory for tunes. George sprang lightly out of

bed, and turned on the cold tap in the bath-room. While he lathered

his face for its morning shave he beamed at himself in the mirror.

It had come at last. The Real Thing.

George had never been in love before. Not really in love. True,

from the age of fifteen, he had been in varying degrees of

intensity attracted sentimentally by the opposite sex. Indeed, at

that period of life of which Mr. Booth Tarkington has written so

searchingly--the age of seventeen--he had been in love with

practically every female he met and with dozens whom he had only

seen in the distance; but ripening years had mellowed his taste and

robbed him of that fine romantic catholicity. During the last five

years women had found him more or less cold. It was the nature of

his profession that had largely brought about this cooling of the

emotions. To a man who, like George, has worked year in and year

out at the composition of musical comedies, woman comes to lose

many of those attractive qualities which ensnare the ordinary male.

To George, of late years, it had begun to seem that the salient

feature of woman as a sex was her disposition to kick. For five

years he had been wandering in a world of women, many of them

beautiful, all of them superficially attractive, who had left no

other impress on his memory except the vigour and frequency with

which they had kicked. Some had kicked about their musical

numbers, some about their love-scenes; some had grumbled about

their exit lines, others about the lines of their second-act

frocks. They had kicked in a myriad differing ways--wrathfully,

sweetly, noisily, softly, smilingly, tearfully, pathetically and

patronizingly; but they had all kicked; with the result that woman

had now become to George not so much a flaming inspiration or a

tender goddess as something to be dodged--tactfully, if possible;

but, if not possible, by open flight. For years he had dreaded to

be left alone with a woman, and had developed a habit of gliding

swiftly away when he saw one bearing down on him.




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