account. Exhibitions of this kind pique curiosity,
and people who come to stare remain to supper, and possibly return to
drop a card on the following afternoon. But, if you go in for this sort
of thing, you must resign yourself to certain inconveniences. Your
pretty drawing-room will be like Park Lane in a state of chronic
obstruction. The carpenter's work will interfere somewhat with your
comfort, and it is tiresome to be perpetually unhinging your doors and
pulling your windows out of their frames. The jealousies and bickerings
among the performers are another source of vexation. Miss A. declines to
sit as Rowena to Miss B.'s Rebecca; and the drawing-room Roscius
invariably objects to the part for which he is cast. Altogether, unless
you have a positive taste for carpentry and green-room squabbles, it is
better to steer clear of private theatricals.

Then there is the musical dodge. In skillful hands there is no better
leverage for pushing operations than drawing-room music. Every one knows
Lady Tweedledum and her amateur concerts. The fuss she makes about them
is prodigious. They are a cheap sort of entertainment, but they cost the
thrifty patroness of art a vast deal of trouble. She is always
organizing practices, arranging rehearsals, drawing up programmes, or
scouring London for musical recruits. She has been known to invade dingy
Government offices for a tenor, and to run a soprano to earth in distant
Bloomsbury. After all, her "music" is only so-so. You may hear better
any night at Even's or the Oxford. One has heard "Dal tuo stellato
soglio" before, and Niedermeyer insipidities are a little _fade_.
Sometimes, to complete the imposture, the names of Mendelssohn and
Mozart are invoked, and, under cover of doing honor to an immortal
composer, a chorus of young people assemble for periodical flirtation.
On the whole, it is wise not to attempt too much. Miss Quaver, with her
staccato notes and semi-professional _minauderies_, is not exactly a
queen of song. Nor does it give one any exquisite delight to hear Sir
Raucisonous Trombone give tongue in a French romance. The talented band
of the Piccadilly Troubadours, floundering through the overture to
_Zampa_, hardly satisfies a refined musical ear. But, however
indifferent in a musical point of view, from the point of view of the
fair projector the thing is a success. It serves as a trap to catch
duchesses, a device for putting salt on the tails of the popinjays of
fa