“Even as he paused to watch the girl threading her way through the crowd, the east wind jabbed an icy finger down the back of his neck, and the chill of it sobered him. After all, he reflected bitterly, this girl was only alone because she was on her way somewhere to meet some confounded man. Besides there was no earthly chance of getting to know her. You can’t rush up to pretty girls in the street and tell them you are lonely. At least, you
can, but it doesn’t get you anywhere except the police station. George’s gloom deepened—a thing he would not have believed
possible a moment before. He felt that he had been born too late.
The restraints of modern civilization irked him. It was not, he told himself, like this in the good old days.

In the Middle Ages, for example, this girl would have been a
Damsel; and in that happy time practically everybody whose
technical rating was that of Damsel was in distress and only too
willing to waive the formalities in return for services rendered by
the casual passer-by. But the twentieth century is a prosaic age,
when girls are merely girls and have no troubles at all”—PG Wodehouse, from “The Damsel in Distress”, with thanks to the Gutenberg Project for the public domain sample.


Additional sample attribution:
from soundtransit.nl:
0553 Takasaki Ryusuke, Ogulin Insects Rhythm Machine
as well as my own sample.