called him away to hold a parcel. He obeyed! At the same instant the
barbaric and repulsive creature's automobile, about as large as a
railway carriage, drove up and forced my frail cab down the street. I
had to wait, humiliated and helpless, the taximeter of my cab
industriously adding penny to penny, while that offensive hag installed
herself, with the help of the maid, the porter and two page-boys, in her
enormous vehicle. I should not have minded had she been young and
pretty. If she had been young and pretty she would have had the right to
be rude and domineering. But she was neither young nor pretty.
Conceivably she had once been young; pretty she could never have been.
And her eyes were hard--hard.

Hence my state of excited annoyance.

"Hullo! How goes it?" The perfect colloquial English was gently murmured
at me with a French accent as the gentle hand patted my shoulder.

"Why," I said, cast violently out of a disagreeable excitement into an
agreeable one, "I do believe you are Boissy Minor!"

I had not seen him for nearly twenty years, but I recognized in that
soft and melancholy Jewish face, with the soft moustache and the soft
beard, the wistful features of the boy of fifteen who had been my
companion at an "international" school (a clever invention for
inflicting exile upon patriots) with branches at Hastings, Dresden and
Versailles.

Soon I was telling him, not without satisfaction, that, being a dramatic
critic, and attached to a London daily paper which had decided to
flatter its readers by giving special criticisms of the more important