George awoke next morning with a misty sense that somehow the worldhad changed. As the last remnants of sleep left him, he was awareof a vague excitement. Then he sat up in bed with a jerk. He hadremembered that he was in love.

　　There was no doubt about it. A curious happiness pervaded hisentire being. He felt young and active. Everything was emphaticallyfor the best in this best of all possible worlds. The sun wasshining. Even the sound of someone in the street below whistlingone of his old compositions, of which he had heartily sickenedtwelve months before, was pleasant to his ears, and this in spiteof the fact that the unseen whistler only touched the key in oddspots and had a poor memory for tunes. George sprang lightly out ofbed, and turned on the cold tap in the bath-room. While he latheredhis face for its morning shave he beamed at himself in the mirror.

　　It had come at last. The Real Thing.

　　George had never been in love before. Not really in love. True,from the age of fifteen, he had been in varying degrees ofintensity attracted sentimentally by the opposite sex. Indeed, atthat period of life of which Mr. Booth Tarkington has written sosearchingly--the age of seventeen--he had been in love withpractically every female he met and with dozens whom he had onlyseen in the distance; but ripening years had mellowed his taste androbbed him of that fine romantic catholicity. During the last fiveyears women had found him more or less cold. It was the nature ofhis profession that had largely brought about this cooling of theemotions. To a man who, like George, has worked year in and yearout at the composition of musical comedies, woman comes to losemany of those attractive qualities which ensnare the ordinary male.

　　To George, of late years, it had begun to seem that the salientfeature of woman as a sex was her disposition to kick. For fiveyears he had been wandering in a world of women, many of thembeautiful, all of them superficially attractive, who had left noother impress on his memory except the vigour and frequency withwhich they had kicked. Some had kicked about their musicalnumbers, some about their love-scenes; some had grumbled abouttheir exit lines, others about the lines of their second-actfrocks. They had kicked in a myriad differing ways--wrathfully,sweetly, noisily, softly, smilingly, tearfully, pathetically andpatronizingly; but they had all kicked; with the result that womanhad now become to George not so much a flaming inspiration or atender goddess as something to be dodged--tactfully, if possible;but, if not possible, by open flight. For years he had dreaded tobe left alone with a woman, and had developed a habit of glidingswiftly away when he saw one bearing down on him.

　　The psychological effect of such a state of things is not difficultto realize. Take a man of naturally quixotic temperament, a man ofchivalrous instincts and a feeling for romance, and cut him off forfive years from the exercise of those qualities, and you get anaccumulated store of foolishness only comparable to an escape ofgas in a sealed room or a cellarful of dynamite. A flicker of amatch, and there is an explosion.