Broadway, after all. He thought it over and, after trying it for a year
or two, decided that Broadway and the Tenderloin did not produce the
sort of Romance he could cherish for long as a self-respecting hero, so
he put certain small temptations aside, chastened himself as well as he
could, and set out for less amiable but more productive by-ways in other
sections of the globe.

We come upon him at last--luckily for us we were not actually following
him--after two years of wonderful but rather disillusioning adventure in
mid-Asia and all Africa. He had seen the Congo and the Euphrates, the
Ganges and the Nile, the Yang-tse-kiang and the Yenisei; he had climbed
mountains in Abyssinia, in Siam, in Thibet and Afghanistan; he had shot
big game in more than one jungle, and had been shot at by small brown
men in more than one forest, to say nothing of the little encounters he
had had in most un-Occidental towns and cities. He had seen women in
Morocco and Egypt and Persia and--But it is a waste of time to
enumerate. Strange to say, he was now drifting back toward the
civilisation which we are pleased to call our own, with a sense of
genuine disappointment in his heart. He had found no sign of Romance.

Adventure in plenty, but Romance--ah, the fairy princesses were in the
story books, after all.

Here he was, twenty-six years old, strong and full of the fire of life,
convincing himself that there was nothing for him to do but to drift
back to dear old New York and talk to his father about going into the
offices; to let his mother tell him over and over again of the nice
girls she knew who did not have to be rescued from ogres and all that
sort of thing in order to settle down to domestic obsolescence; to tell
his sister and all of their mutual friends the whole truth and nothing