knew the desolation of the agent's dingy stairs; he knew the
heartache of the agent's dingy outer office.

He was familiar, too, with bleak rehearsals, hours of listless
waiting for his little scenes; with his powerlessness to get into
his simple words the particular intonation required by an overdriven
producer. Familiar, too, with long and hungry Sunday railway
journeys when pious refreshment rooms are shut; with little mean
towns like Bludston, where he and three or four of the company
shared the same mean theatrical lodgings; with the dirty, insanitary
theatres; with the ceaseless petty jealousies and bickerings of the
ill-paid itinerant troupe. The discomforts affected Paul but
little, he had never had experience of luxuries, and the life
itself was silken ease compared with what it would have been but for
Barney Bill's kidnapping. It never occurred to him to complain of
nubbly bed and ill-cooked steak and crowded and unventilated
dressing rooms; but it always struck him as being absurd that such
should continue to be the lot of one predestined to greatness. There
was some flaw in the working of destiny. It puzzled him.

Once indeed, being out, but having an engagement ahead, and waiting
for rehearsals to begin, he had found himself sufficiently
prosperous to take a third-class ticket to Paris, where he spent a
glorious month. But the prosperity never returned, and he had to
live on his memories of Paris.

During these years books were, as ever, his joy and his consolation.
He taught himself French and a little German. He read history,
philosophy, a smattering of science, and interested himself in
politics. So aristocratic a personage naturally had passionate Tory