bby and
intentionally-young man in the act of gazing through the small window
into the studio exactly as he himself had been gazing a few minutes
earlier.

"Hel_lo_, Prohack!" exclaimed the chubby and intentionally-young man,
with the utmost geniality and calmness.

"How d'ye do?" responded Mr. Prohack with just as much calmness and
perhaps ten per cent less geniality. Mr. Prohack was a peculiar fellow,
and that on this occasion he gave rather less geniality than he received
was due to the fact that he had never before spoken to the cupid in his
life and that he was wondering whether membership of the same club
entirely justified so informal a mode of address--without an
introduction and outside the club premises. For, like all modest men,
Mr. Prohack had some sort of a notion of his own dignity, a sort of a
notion that occasionally took him quite by surprise. Mr. Prohack did not
even know the surname of his aggressor. He only knew that he never
overheard other men call him anything but "Ozzie." Had not Mr. Prohack
been buried away all his life in the catacombs of the Treasury and thus
cut off from the great world-movement, he would have been fully aware
that Oswald Morfey was a person of importance in the West End of London,
that he was an outstanding phenomenon of the age, that he followed very
closely all the varying curves of the great world-movement, that he was
constantly to be seen on the pavements of Piccadilly, Bond Street, St.
James's Street, Pall Mall and Hammersmith, that he was never absent from
a good first night or a private view of very new or very old pictures or
a distinguished concert or a poetry-reading or a fashionable auction at
Christie's, that he received invitations to dinner for every night in
the week and accepted all those that did not clash with the others, that
in return for these abundant meals he gave about once a month a
tea-party in his trifling Japanese flat in Bruton Street, where the
sandwiches were as thin as the sound of the harpsichord which eighteenth
century ladies played at his request; and that he was in truth what Mr.
Asprey Chown called "social secretary" to Mr. Asprey Chown.

Mr. Prohack might be excused for his ignorance of this last fact, for
the relation between Asprey Chown and Ozzie was never very clearly
defined--at any rate by Ozzie. He had no doubt learned, from an enforced
acquaintance with the sides of motor-omnibuses, that Mr. Asprey Chown
was a theatre-manage