Five minutes afterwards the two distinguished men, talking easily together, walked through the vestibule of the hotel, down the great courtyard and into the roaring Strand.
A hotel clerk explained the celebrities to a voluble group of American tourists as they went by.
[CHAPTER V]
BY THE TOWER OF HIPPICUS
Harold Spence was essentially a man of action. His mental and moral health depended for its continuance upon the active prosecution of affairs more than most men's.
A product of the day, "modern" in his culture, modern in his ideals, he must live the vivid, eager, strenuous life of his times or the fibres of his brain became slack and loosened.
In the absorbing interest of his first mission to the East Spence had found work which exactly suited his temperament. It was work which keyed him up to his best and most successful efforts.
But when that was over, when the news that he had given brilliantly to the world became the world's and was no longer his, then the reaction set in.