The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Agony Column, by Earl Derr Biggers

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Title: The Agony Column

Author: Earl Derr Biggers

Posting Date: October 5, 2008 [EBook #1814]
Release Date: July, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE AGONY COLUMN

by Earl Derr Biggers

CHAPTER I

London that historic summer was almost unbearably hot. It seems, looking
back, as though the big baking city in those days was meant to serve as
an anteroom of torture--an inadequate bit of preparation for the
hell that was soon to break in the guise of the Great War. About the
soda-water bar in the drug store near the Hotel Cecil many American
tourists found solace in the sirups and creams of home. Through the
open windows of the Piccadilly tea shops you might catch glimpses of
the English consuming quarts of hot tea in order to become cool. It is a
paradox they swear by.

About nine o'clock on the morning of Friday, July twenty-fourth, in that
memorable year nineteen hundred and fourteen, Geoffrey West left his
apartments in Adelphi Terrace and set out for breakfast at the Carlton.
He had found the breakfast room of that dignified hotel the coolest
in London, and through some miracle, for the season had passed,
strawberries might still be had there. As he took his way through the
crowded Strand, surrounded on all sides by honest British faces wet
with honest British perspiration he thought longingly of his rooms in
Washington Square, New York. For West, despite the English sound of that
Geoffrey, was as American as Kansas, his native state, and only pressing
business was at that moment holding him in England, far from the country
that glowed unusually rosy because of its remoteness.

At the Carlton news stand West bought two morning papers--the Times
for study and the Mail for entertainment and then passed on into the
restaurant. His waiter--a tall soldierly Prussian, more blond than West
himself--saw him coming and, with a nod and a mechanical German smile,
set out for the plate of strawberries which he knew would be the first
th