ticing personages passed the glass box,
casting hostile glances askance at me on my high stool. A message came
back.

"If it's Mr. Etchingham Granger, he's to follow Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly's
at once."

I followed Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly's--to a little flat in a neighbourhood
that I need not specify. The eminent journalist was lunching with the
eminent actress. A husband was in attendance--a nonentity with a heavy
yellow moustache, who hummed and hawed over his watch.

Mr. Fox was full-faced, with a persuasive, peremptory manner. Mrs.
Hartly was--well, she was just Mrs. Hartly. You remember how we all fell
in love with her figure and her manner, and her voice, and the way she
used her hands. She broke her bread with those very hands; spoke to her
husband with that very voice, and rose from table with that same
graceful management of her limp skirts. She made eyes at me; at her
husband; at little Fox, at the man who handed the asparagus--great
round grey eyes. She was just the same. The curtain never fell on that
eternal dress rehearsal. I don't wonder the husband was forever looking
at his watch.

Mr. Fox was a friend of the house. He dispensed with ceremony, read my
manuscript over his Roquefort, and seemed to find it add to the savour.

"You are going to do me for Mr. Fox," Mrs. Hartly said, turning her
large grey eyes upon me. They were very soft. They seemed to send out
waves of intense sympatheticism. I thought of those others that had shot
out a razor-edged ray.

"Why," I answered, "there was some talk of my doing somebody for the
_Hour_."

Fox put my manuscript under his empty tumbler.

"Yes," he said, sharply. "He will do, I think. H'm, yes. Why, yes."

"You're a friend of Mr. Callan's, aren't you?" Mrs. Hartly asked, "What
a dear, nice man he is! You should see him at rehearsals. You know I'm
doing his 'Boldero'; he's given me a perfectly lovely part--perfectly
lovely. And the trouble he takes. He tries every chair on the stage."

"H'm; yes," Fox interjected, "he likes to have his own way."

"We _all_ like that," the great actress said. She was quoting from her
first great part. I thought--but, perhaps, I was mistaken--that all her
utterances were quotations from her first great part. Her husband looked
at his watch.

"Are you coming to this confounded flower show?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, turning her mysterious eyes upon him, "I'll go and get
ready."

She disappeared through an inner door.