Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III IF TWO MEN ARE AGREED, THEIR FORCE CAN CLEAVE GRANITE THE address which Miss Hampden had written upon her letter of introduction was
172 B 5 j. It was a simple enough form as London addresses went under the new system, but it presented difficulties to a man whose knowledge of the Capital had been gained in the days when it was mapped out under the antiquated and haphazard arrangement of street names, now so happily displaced. Salt, as he had chosen to call himself, consulted a policeman who was regulating traffic outside Charing Cross Station, but with no great success. Don’t ask me, sir, replied the harassed man, who had just extricated himself with difficulty from the embrace of a Bessarabian refugee who wanted 237AAiSr3b Street. All I know is that this is D Street that we’re in?and I believe it, straight. If I was you, I should make a cast up by the Marble Arch. He had once upon a time been in the old City police force and still retained traces of a courteous bearing. Mr Alf. Clinch, a member of the London County Council for the Deptford division, was the inventor of this rational system, which made for economyand efficiency like all the other enactments of that well-meaning body. Economy was a very desirable feature just at that time. Municipal governing bodies had, so far, acted on the implicit belief that when private enterprise failed in any undertaking they themselves could take it up and at once turn it into a conspicuous success. Unfortunately the more accurate version in practice, as people were beginning to find out, was that where others were working with success and a Council supplanted them, in nine cases out of ten they at once turned it into a conspicuous failure. When they went further and essayed what business men had found to be…
