n there; it's really a ripping
neighbourhood. Have you chucked the Bar? You ought to do something, you
know; it'll be fatal for you to have nothing to do. I tell you what,
Bird: you ought to stand for the County Council."

But before Shelton had replied they reached the theatre, and their
energies were spent in sidling to their stalls. He had time to pass his
neighbours in review before the play began. Seated next to him was a
lady with large healthy shoulders, displayed with splendid liberality;
beyond her a husband, red-cheeked, with drooping, yellow-grey moustache
and a bald head; beyond him again two men whom he had known at Eton. One
of them had a clean-shaved face, dark hair, and a weather-tanned
complexion; his small mouth with its upper lip pushed out above the
lower, his eyelids a little drooped over his watchful eyes, gave him a
satirical and resolute expression. "I've got hold of your tail, old
fellow," he seemed to say, as though he were always busy with the
catching of some kind of fox. The other's goggling eyes rested on
Shelton with a chaffing smile; his thick, sleek hair, brushed with water
and parted in the middle, his neat moustache and admirable waistcoat,
suggested the sort of dandyism that despises women. From his recognition
of these old schoolfellows Shelton turned to look at Halidome, who,
having cleared his throat, was staring straight before him at the
curtain. Antonia's words kept running in her lover's head, "I don't like
unhealthy people." Well, all these people, anyway, were healthy; they
looked as if they had defied the elements to endow them with a spark of
anything but health. Just then the curtain rose.

Slowly, unwillingly, for he was of a trustful disposition, Shelton
recognised that this play was one of those masterpieces of the modern
drama whose characters were drawn on the principle that men were made for
morals rather than morals made by men, and he watched the play unfold
with all its careful sandwiching of grave and gay.

A married woman anxious to be ridded of her husband was the pivot of the
story, and a number of scenes, ingeniously contrived, with a hundred
reasons why this desire was wrong and inexpedient, were revealed to
Shelton's eyes. These reasons issued mainly from the mouth of a
well-preserved old gentleman who seemed to play the part of a sort of
Moral Salesman. He turned to Halidome and whispered:

"Can you stand that old woman?"

His friend fix