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.