“I thought,” Guy murmured, “that I would swim at the Bath Club this afternoon. I get ideas, quick as you like. But every one else had also been thinking on the same lines, so you can imagine the crowd. A man there told me that the best way to get in was to pick on the fattest man in the water and as he came out slip into the hole he’d made. But I couldn’t even see the water....”
Tall as a tree, his hat swinging lazily in his hand near his thigh, he lounged on....
“Sickening,” he murmured.
Bus after bus, laden with the people from the theatres, thundered past us and up and down the switchback, embracing us with waves of heat so that one’s very skin felt like a sticky garment....
“Yes,” I said.
“London’s all right,” said Guy thoughtfully, “as London....”
“Of course,” I said, “as London....”
The wide sweep of Hyde Park Corner lay ahead of us like a bright handkerchief in the night. The buses trumpeted across it and around it and down it and up it, but one and all looked as snails beside Bus No. 16, which is beyond compare the fastest bus in London, making the voyage from Grosvenor Place to Hamilton Place and back again at a speed to astonish the eye of man.
The din that night makes in closing its doors on London was as though muted by the still, stifling air, and I envied the lofty calm of the Duke of Wellington where he rides for ever amid his pleasaunce of small trees. The lights or Constitution Hill glowed like fire-flies between the leafy valley of the Green Park and the dark gardens of His Majesty the King.
“Trouble about London is,” said Guy thoughtfully, “that people are always expecting it to be Paris or Rome or some other place. Always wanting something else, people are....”