Germany. She always sniffed when Bartley asked me to play for him. She
considered that a newfangled way of making a match of it."

When Alexander came in a few moments later, he found Wilson and his wife
still confronting the photograph. "Oh, let us get that out of the way,"
he said, laughing. "Winifred, Thomas can bring my trunk down. I've
decided to go over to New York to-morrow night and take a fast boat. I
shall save two days."

CHAPTER II

On the night of his arrival in London, Alexander went immediately to the
hotel on the Embankment at which he always stopped, and in the lobby he
was accosted by an old acquaintance, Maurice Mainhall, who fell upon him
with effusive cordiality and indicated a willingness to dine with him.
Bartley never dined alone if he could help it, and Mainhall was a good
gossip who always knew what had been going on in town; especially, he
knew everything that was not printed in the newspapers. The nephew of
one of the standard Victorian novelists, Mainhall bobbed about among the
various literary cliques of London and its outlying suburbs, careful to
lose touch with none of them. He had written a number of books himself;
among them a "History of Dancing," a "History of Costume," a "Key to
Shakespeare's Sonnets," a study of "The Poetry of Ernest Dowson," etc.
Although Mainhall's enthusiasm was often tiresome, and although he was
often unable to distinguish between facts and vivid figments of his
imagination, his imperturbable good nature overcame even the people whom
he bored most, so that they ended by becoming, in a reluctant manner,
his friends. In appearance, Mainhall was astonishingly like the
conventional stage-Englishman of American drama: tall and thin, with
high, hitching shoulders and a small head glistening with closely
brushed yellow hair. He spoke with an extreme Oxford accent, and when he
was talking well, his face sometimes wore the rapt expression of a very
emotional man listening to music. Mainhall liked Alexander because he
was an engineer. He had preconceived ideas about everything, and his
idea about Americans was that they should be engineers or mechanics. He
hated them when they presumed to be anything else.

While they sat at dinner Mainhall acquainted Bartley with the fortunes
of his old friends in London, and as they left the table he proposed
that they should go to see Hugh MacConnell's new comedy, "Bog Lights."

"It's really quite the best thing MacConnell