A. L. BURT COMPANY Copyright, 1911, 1912, By Louis Joseph Vance. ——— All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian Published, April, 1912 Reprinted, April, 1912 (three times) By Louis Joseph Vance. TO LEWIS BUDDY III TO CONTENTS Chapter Page [Pg 1] [Pg 1] THE BANDBOX I INTRODUCING MR. IFF At half-past two of a sunny, sultry afternoon late in the month of August, Mr. Benjamin Staff sat at table in the dining-room of the Authors’ Club, moodily munching a morsel of cheese and a segment of cast-iron biscuit and wondering what he must do to be saved from the death-in-life of sheer ennui. A long, lank gentleman, surprisingly thin, of a slightly saturnine cast: he was not only unhappy, he looked it. He was alone and he was lonely; he was an American and a man of sentiment (though he didn’t look that) and he wanted to go home; to sum up, he found himself in love and in London at one and the same time, and felt precisely as ill at ease in the one as in the other of these, to him, exotic circumstances. Inconceivable as it may seem that any rational man should yearn for New York in August, that and nothing less was what Staff wanted with all his heart. He wanted to go home and swelter and be swindled[Pg 2] by taxicab drivers and snubbed by imported head-waiters; he wanted to patronise the subway at peril of asphyxiation and to walk down Fifth Avenue at that witching hour when electric globes begin to dot
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