This novel is from 1921.
Excerpt from the book:
Young Henry Trenchard, one fine afternoon in
the Spring of 1920, had an amazing adventure.
He was standing at the edge of Piccadilly
Circus, just in front of Swan and Edgar's where
the omnibuses stopped. They now stop there no
longer but take a last frenzied leap around the
corner into Regent Street, greatly to the disappoint-
ment of many people who still linger at the old spot
and have a vague sense all the rest of the day of
having been cheated by the omnibus companies.
Henry generally paused there before crossing
the Circus, partly because he was short-sighted and
partly because he never became tired of the spectacle
of life and excitement that Piccadilly Circus offered
to him. His pince-nez, that never properly fitted his
nose, always covered one eye more than the other
and gave the interested spectator a dramatic sense of
suspense because they seemed to be eternally at the
crisis of falling to the ground, there to be smashed
into a hundred pieces, these pince-nez coloured his
whole life. Had he worn spectacles — large, round,
moon-shaped ones as he should have done — he
would have seen life steadily and seen it whole, but a
kind of rather pathetic vanity — although he was not
really vain — prevented him from buying spectacles.
The ill-balancing of these pince-nez is at the back
of all those adventures of his that this book is going
to record.
Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. A prolific writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, his high profile as a lecturer and his driving ambition brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. A best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death.
........summary from wikipedia
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