r of some activity, but he certainly had not truly
comprehended that Mr. Asprey Chown was head of one of the two great
rival theatrical combines and reputed to be the most accomplished
showman in the Western hemisphere, with a jewelled finger in notable
side-enterprises such as prize-fights, restaurants, and industrial
companies. The knowing ones from whom naught is hidden held that Asprey
Chown had never given a clearer proof of genius than in engaging this
harmless and indefatigable parasite of the West End to be his social
secretary. The knowing ones said further that whereas Ozzie was saving
money, nobody could be sure that Asprey Chown was saving money. The
engagement had a double effect--it at once put Asprey Chown into touch
with everything that could be useful to him for the purposes of special
booming, and it put Ozzie into touch with half the theatrical stars of
London--in an age when a first-rate heroine of revue was worth at least
two duchesses and a Dame in the scale of social values.

Mr. Oswald Morfey, doubtless in order to balance the modernity of his
taste in the arts, wore a tight black stock and a wide eyeglass ribbon
in the daytime, and in the evening permitted himself to associate a soft
silk shirt with a swallow-tail coat. It was to Mr. Prohack's secondary
(and more exclusive) club that he belonged. Inoffensive though he was,
he had managed innocently to offend Mr. Prohack. "Who is the fellow?"
Mr. Prohack had once asked a friend in the club, and having received no
answer but "Ozzie," Mr. Prohack had added: "He's a perfect ass," and had
given as a reason for this harsh judgment: "Well, I can't stick the way
he walks across the hall."

In the precincts of the dance-studio Mr. Oswald Morfey said in that
simple, half-lisping tone and with that wide-open child-like glance that
characterised most of his remarks:

"A very prosperous little affair here!" Having said this, he let his
eyeglass fall into the full silkiness of his shirt-front, and turned and
smiled very amicably and agreeably on Mr. Prohack, who could not help
thinking: "Perhaps after all you aren't such a bad sort of an idiot."

"Yes," said Mr. Prohack. "Do you often get as far as Putney?" For Mr.
Oswald Morfey, enveloped as he unquestionably was in the invisible aura
of the West End, seemed conspicuously out of place in a dance-studio in
a side-street in Putney, having rather the air of an angelic visitant.

"Well, now I come to think o