lies to some place of amusement or boredom;
occasionally a private carriage drawn by expensive and self-conscious
horses put the hansoms to shame by its mere outward glory. It was a hot
night, a night for the summer woods, and save for the vehicles there was
no rapid movement of any kind. It seemed as though the world--the world,
that is to say, of the Grand Babylon--was fully engaged in the solemn
processes of digestion and small-talk. Even the long row of the
Embankment gas-lamps, stretching right and left, scarcely trembled in
the still, warm, caressing air. The stars overhead looked down with
many blinkings upon the enormous pile of the Grand Babylon, and the moon
regarded it with bland and changeless face; what they thought of it
and its inhabitants cannot, unfortunately, be recorded. What Theodore
Racksole thought of the moon can be recorded: he thought it was a
nuisance. It somehow fascinated his gaze with its silly stare, and
so interfered with his complex meditations. He glanced round at the
well-dressed and satisfied people--his guests, his customers. They
appeared to ignore him absolutely.

Probably only a very small percentage of them had the least idea
that this tall spare man, with the iron-grey hair and the thin, firm,
resolute face, who wore his American-cut evening clothes with such
careless ease, was the sole proprietor of the Grand Babylon, and
possibly the richest man in Europe. As has already been stated, Racksole
was not a celebrity in England.

The guests of the Grand Babylon saw merely a restless male person, whose
restlessness was rather a disturber of their quietude, but with whom,
to judge by his countenance, it would be inadvisable to remonstrate.
Therefore Theodore Racksole continued his perambulations unchallenged,
and kept saying to himself, 'I must do something.' But what? He could
think of no course to pursue.

At last he walked straight through the hotel and out at the other
entrance, and so up the little unassuming side street into the roaring
torrent of the narrow and crowded Strand. He jumped on a Putney bus, and
paid his fair to Putney, fivepence, and then, finding that the humble
occupants of the vehicle stared at the spectacle of a man in evening
dress but without a dustcoat, he jumped off again, oblivious of the
fact that the conductor jerked a thumb towards him and winked at the
passengers as who should say, 'There goes a lunatic.' He went into a
tobacconist's shop and asked