could wheedle into the box-office. When the climax came, Llewellyn
usually went to hospital and received the reporters of local papers in
pathetic audience there, which counteracted the effect of the astounding
statements the stars made in letters to the editor, and yet gave the
public clearly to understand that owing to its coldness and neglect a
number of ladies and gentlemen of very superior talents were subsisting
in their midst mainly upon brinjals and soda-water. "I'm in hospital,"
Mr. Stanhope would say to the reporters, "and I'm d---- glad of it,"--he
always insisted on the oath going in, it appealed so sympathetically to
the domiciled Englishman grown cold to superiority,--"for, upon my soul,
I don't know where I'd turn for a crust if I weren't." In the end the
talented ladies and gentlemen usually went home by an inexpensive
line as the voluntary arrangement of a public to whom plain soda was a
ludicrous hardship, and native vegetables an abomination at any price.
Then Llewellyn and Rosa Norton--she had a small inalienable income, and
they were really married though they preferred for some inexplicable
reason to be thought guilty of less conventional behaviour--would depart
in another direction, full of gratification for the present and of
confidence for the future. Llewellyn usually made a parting statement to
the newspapers that although his aims were unalterably high he was not
above profiting by experience, and that next season he could be relied
upon to hit the taste of the community with precision. This year, as
we know, he had made a serious effort by insisting that at least a
proportion of his ladies and gentlemen should be high-kickers and equal
to an imitation, good enough for the Orient, of most things done by the
illustrious Mr. Chevalier. But the fact that Mr. Stanhope had selected
The Offence of Galilee to open with tells its own tale. He was
convinced, but not converted, and he stood there with his little legs
apart, chewing a straw above the three uncut emeralds that formed the
chaste decoration of his shirt-front, giving the public of Calcutta one