seven o'clock
The only anodyne was a forgetfulness of self , the only compensation a glimmer of a hope and the shadow of a smile in the grey and leaden lives around me . On Whit Monday evening I was walking along the Thames Embankment on my way home from Waterloo Station , wet through , tired out , disappointed , and looking forward to the dry , soft raiment , the warm , cosy room , the excellent dinner that awaited me in my flat . I -- with several others -- had been helping Campion with his annual outing of factory girls and young hooligans . The weather , which had been perfect on Saturday , Sunday , and when we had started , a gay and astonishing army , at seven o'clock , had broken before ten . It had rained , dully miserable , insistently all day long . The happy day in the New Forest had been a damp and dismal fiasco . I was returning home , thinking I might walk off an incipient chill , as depressed as no one but the baffled philanthropist can be , when I perceived a tattered and dejected man sitting on a bench , a clothes-basket between his feet , his elbows on his knees , his head in his hands , and sobbing as if his heart would break .