north, had been arranged for the
evening.

"One will be enough," said George.

"Are you alone?" asked the Town Clerk's clerk.

George took the ticket. None of the city fathers or their fashionable
sons had even invited him to dinner. He went forth and had tea alone,
while reading in an evening paper about the Austro-Serbian situation, in
the tea-rooms attached to a cinema-palace. The gorgeous rooms, throbbing
to two-steps and fox-trots, were crammed with customers; but the
waitresses behaved competently. Thence he drove out in a taxi to the
residence of Alderman Soulter. He could see neither the Alderman nor
Miss Soulter; he learnt that the condition of the patient was
reassuring, and that the patient had a very good constitution. Back at
the hotel, he had to wait for dinner. In due course he ate the customary
desolating table-d'hote dinner which is served simultaneously in the
vast, odorous dining-rooms, all furnished alike, of scores and scores of
grand hotels throughout the provinces. Having filled his cigar-case, he
set out once more into the beautiful summer evening. In broad Side Gate
were massed the chief resorts of amusement. The facade of the Empire
music-hall glowed with great rubies and emeralds and amethysts and
topazes in the fading light. Its lure was more powerful than the lure of
the ballad concert. Ignoring his quasi-official duty to the greatest of
sentimental contraltos, he pushed into the splendid foyer of the Empire.
One solitary stall, half a crown, was left for the second house; he
bought it, eager in transgression; he felt that the ballad concert would
have sent him mad.

The auditorium of the Empire was far larger than the auditorium of the
town hall, and it was covered with gold. The curving rows of
plush-covered easy chairs extended backwards until faces became
indistinguishable points in the smoke-misted gloom. Every seat was
occupied; the ballad concert had made no impression upon the music-hall.
The same stars that he could see in London appeared on the gigantic
stage in the same songs and monologues; and as in London the
indispensable revue was performed, but with a grosser and more direct
licentiousness than the West End would have permitted. And all proceeded
with inexorable exactitude according to time-table. And in scores and
scores of similar Empires, Hippodromes, Alhambras, and Pavilions
throughout the provinces, similar entertainments were proceeding with
the same exactitude--a