your appointment with Sir Henry Butcher.'

He pulled a long face.

'You'll hate it, I know,' she added, 'but there is the theatre, and
you've got to make the best of it. I dare say Michael Angelo didn't
care particularly for the Sistine Chapel.'

III

IMPERIUM

Sir Henry Butcher sat in his sanctum, pulling his aggressive, bulbous
nose, and ruefully turning over the account presented by his manager of
the last week's business with his new production, a spectacular version
of _Ivanhoe_, in which he appeared as Isaac of York.

'No pull,' he muttered. 'No pull.' And to console himself he took up
a little pink packet of Press cuttings, and perused them....
'Wonderful notices! Wonderful notices! It's these confounded
music-halls and cinemas, lowering the people's taste. Yet the public's
loyal, wonderfully loyal. Must be the play. Wish I'd read the book
before I let old Kinslake have his three hundred. Told me everybody
had read it....'

Sir Henry was a man of sixty, well-preserved, with the soft, infantine
quality which grease paint imparts to the skin. He had an enormous
head, large dark eyes, sly and humorous, in which, as his shallow
whimsical thoughts flitted through his brain, mischief glinted. He was
surrounded with portraits of himself in his various successes, and
above his head was a bust of himself in the character of Napoleon.
Every now and then, when he remembered it, he compressed his lips, and
tucked his chin into his breast, but he could not deceive even himself,
much less anybody else, and his habitual expression was that of a bland
baby miraculously endowed with a knowledge of the world's mischief.

His room was luxurious but dark, being lit only by a skylight. The
walls were lined with a dull gold lincrusta, and on them were hung
portraits of the proprietor of the Imperium and a series of drawings
for the famous Imperium posters, which had through many years
brightened the gloomy streets of London and its ever expanding
outskirts. Sir Henry's mischievous eyes flitted from drawing to
drawing, and his tongue passed over his thick lips as he tasted again
the savour of his success--more than twenty unbroken years of it. He
thought of the crowded houses, the brilliant audiences he had gathered
together, the happy speeches he had made, the banquets he had held
after so many first performances--and then he thought of _Ivanhoe_, a
mistake. Worse than a mistake, a strategical blunder, f