THE BANDBOX

“Now, sir!” she exclaimed, turning

Frontispiece. See Page 83

The Bandbox

BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

Author of “The Brass Bowl,” “The Bronze Bell,” “Cynthia-of-the-Minute,” etc. With Four Illustrations By ARTHUR I. KELLER

A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers                                                 New York

Copyright, 1911, 1912,
By Louis Joseph Vance.
———
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian

Published, April, 1912
Reprinted, April, 1912 (three times)

TO
LEWIS BUDDY III

CONTENTS

THE BANDBOX

I

INTRODUCING MR. IFF

At half-past two of a sunny, sultry afternoon late in the month of August, Mr. Benjamin Staff sat at table in the dining-room of the Authors’ Club, moodily munching a morsel of cheese and a segment of cast-iron biscuit and wondering what he must do to be saved from the death-in-life of sheer ennui.

A long, lank gentleman, surprisingly thin, of a slightly saturnine cast: he was not only unhappy, he looked it. He was alone and he was lonely; he was an American and a man of sentiment (though he didn’t look that) and he wanted to go home; to sum up, he found himself in love and in London at one and the same time, and felt precisely as ill at ease in the one as in the other of these, to him, exotic circumstances.

Inconceivable as it