The Gem Collector

The supper room of the Savoy Hotel was all brightness and glitter and gayety. But Sir James Willoughby Pitt baronet of the United Kingdom looked round about him through the smoke of his cigarette and felt moodily that this was a flat world despite the geographers and that he was very much alone in it. He felt old. If it is ever allowable for a young man of twenty-six to give himself up to melancholy reflections Jimmy Pitt might have been excused for doing so at that moment. Nine years ago he had dropped out or to put it more exactly had been kicked out and had ceased to belong to London. And now he had returned to find himself in a strange city.