The Young Enchanted: A Romantic Story

MOTTO
to me over the past Decillions. There is no better than it And now. What behaves well In the past or behaves well To-day is not such a wonder. The wonder is always and Always how there can be A mean man or an infidel.
Walt Whitman.

Young Henry Trenchard, one fine afternoon in the Spring of 1920, had an amazing adventure.
He was standing at the edge of Piccadilly Circus, just in front of Swan and Edgar's where the omnibuses stopped. They now stop there no longer but take a last frenzied leap around the corner into Regent Street, greatly to the disappointment of many people who still linger at the old spot and have a vague sense all the rest of the day of having been cheated by the omnibus companies.
Henry generally paused there before crossing the Circus partly because he was short-sighted and partly because he never became tired of the spectacle of life and excitement that Piccadilly Circus offered to him. His pince-nez that never properly fitted his nose, always covered one eye more than the other and gave the interested spectator a dramatic sense of suspense because they seemed to be eternally at the crisis of falling to the ground, there to be smashed into a hundred pieces—these pince-nez coloured his whole life. Had he worn spectacles—large, round, moon-shaped ones as he should have done—he would have seen life steadily and seen it whole, but a kind of rather pathetic vanity—although he was not really vain—prevented him from buying spectacles. The ill-balancing of these pince-nez is at the back of all these adventures of his that this book is going to record.
He waited, between the rushing of the omnibuses, for the right moment in which to cross, and while he waited a curious fancy occurred to him. This fancy had often occurred to him before, but he had never confessed it to any one—not even to Millicent—not because he was especially ashamed of it but because he was afraid that his audience would laugh at him, and if there was one thing at this time that Henry disliked it was to be laughed at.