About nine o’clock
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 . As he took his way through the crowded Strand , surrounded on all sides by honest British faces wet with honest British perspiration he thought longingly of his rooms in Washington Square , New York . For West , despite the English sound of that Geoffrey , was as American as Kansas , his native state , and only pressing business was at that moment holding him in England , far from the country that glowed unusually rosy because of its remoteness .