Explore "Piccadilly Jim" by P. G. Wodehouse on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The noonday sun beat down on Park Row. Hurrying mortals, released from a thousand offices, congested the sidewalks, their thoughts busy with the vision of lunch. Up and down the canyon of Nassau Street the crowds moved more slowly. Candy-selling aliens jostled newsboys, and huge dray-horses endeavoured to the best of their ability not to grind the citizenry beneath their hooves. Eastward, pressing on to the City Hall, surged the usual dense army of happy lovers on their way to buy marriage-licenses. Men popped in and out of the subway entrances like rabbits. It was a stirring, bustling scene, typical of this nerve-centre of New York's vast body.
Jimmy Crocker, standing in the doorway, watched the throngs enviously. There were men in that crowd who chewed gum, there were men who wore white satin ties with imitation diamond stickpins, there were men who, having smoked seven-tenths of a cigar, were eating the remainder: but there was not one with whom he would not at that moment willingly have exchanged identities. For these men had jobs. And in his present frame of mind it seemed to him that no further ingredient was needed for the recipe of the ultimate human bliss.