ly obtained material
enjoyment." The writer was a man who had known bondage, so he spoke at
any rate with authority. Of the London of the moment it could not,
however, be said with any truth that it was merry, but merely that its
inhabitants made desperate endeavour not to appear crushed under their
catastrophe. Surrounded as he was now with a babble of tongues and
shrill mechanical repartee, Yeovil's mind went back to the book and its
account of a theatre audience in the Turkish days of Bulgaria, with its
light and laughing crowd of critics and spectators. Bulgaria! The
thought of that determined little nation came to him with a sharp sense
of irony. There was a people who had not thought it beneath the dignity
of their manhood to learn the trade and discipline of arms. They had
their reward; torn and exhausted and debt-encumbered from their
campaigns, they were masters in their own house, the Bulgarian flag flew
over the Bulgarian mountains. And Yeovil stole a glance at the crown of
Charlemagne set over the Royal box.

In a capacious box immediately opposite the one set aside for royalty the
Lady Shalem sat in well-considered prominence, confident that every press
critic and reporter would note her presence, and that one or two of them
would describe, or misdescribe, her toilet. Already quite a considerable
section of the audience knew her by name, and the frequency with which
she graciously nodded towards various quarters of the house suggested the
presence of a great many personal acquaintances. She had attained to
that desirable feminine altitude of purse and position when people who go
about everywhere know you well by sight and have never met your dress
before.

Lady Shalem was a woman of commanding presence, of that type which
suggests a consciousness that the command may not necessarily be obeyed;
she had observant eyes and a well-managed voice. Her successes in life
had been worked for, but they were also to some considerable extent the
result of accident. Her public history went back to the time when, in
the person of her husband, Mr. Conrad Dort, she had contested two
hopeless and very expensive Parliamentary elections on behalf of her
party; on each occasion the declaration of the poll had shown a heavy
though reduced majority on the wrong side, but she might have perpetrated
an apt misquotation of the French monarch's traditional message after the
defeat of Pavia, and assured the world "all is