limpid eyes of Marjorie looking back softly over her shoulder--but only
at the tattooed wild boy. Nearly always it is woman who puts the irony
into life.

After this, perhaps because of sated curiosity, perhaps on account of a
pin famine, the attendance began to languish. Only four responded to
the next call of the band; the four dwindled to three; finally the
entertainment was given for one blase auditor, and Schofield and
Williams looked depressed. Then followed an interval when the band
played in vain.

About three o'clock Schofield and Williams were gloomily discussing
various unpromising devices for startling the public into a renewal of
interest, when another patron unexpectedly appeared and paid a cent for
his admission. News of the Big Show and Museum of Curiosities had at
last penetrated the far, cold spaces of interstellar niceness, for this
new patron consisted of no less than Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Junior,
escaped in a white "sailor suit" from the Manor during a period of
severe maternal and tutorial preoccupation.

He seated himself without parley, and the pufformance was offered for
his entertainment with admirable conscientiousness. True to the Lady
Clara caste and training, Roderick's pale, fat face expressed nothing
except an impervious superiority and, as he sat, cold and unimpressed
upon the front bench, like a large, white lump, it must be said that
he made a discouraging audience "to play to." He was not, however,
unresponsive--far from it. He offered comment very chilling to the warm
grandiloquence of the orator.

"That's my uncle Ethelbert's dachshund," he remarked, at the beginning