of her activities. They spoke primly and decisively. It was true that
they feared; but their fear was based on consideration for themselves
rather than on consideration for Miss Fiddle. Ozzie was plainly snubbed.
He had offered a wonderful privilege, and it had been disdained.

Mr. Prohack could not bear the spectacle of Ozzie's discomfiture. His
sad weakness for pleasing people overcame him, and, putting his hand
benevolently on the young man's shoulder, he said:

"My dear fellow, personally I'm dying to go."

They went by strangely narrow corridors and through iron doors across
the stage, whose shirt-sleeved, ragged population seemed to be behaving
as though the last trump had sounded, and so upstairs and along a broad
passage full of doors ajar from which issued whispers and exclamations
and transient visions of young women. From the star's dressing-room, at
the end, a crowd of all sorts and conditions of persons was being
pushed. Mr. Prohack trembled with an awful apprehension, and asked
himself vainly what in the name of commonsense he was doing there, and
prayed that Ozzie might be refused admission. The next moment he was
being introduced to a middle-aged woman in a middle-aged dressing-gown.
Her face was thickly caked with paint and powder, her eyes surrounded
with rings of deepest black, her finger-nails red. Mr. Prohack, not
without difficulty, recognised Eliza. A dresser stood on either side of
her. Blinding showers of electric light poured down upon her defenceless
but hardy form. She shook hands, but Mr. Prohack deemed that she ought
to bear a notice: "Danger. Visitors are requested not to touch."

"So good of you to come round," she said, in her rich and powerful
voice, smiling with all her superb teeth. Mr. Prohack, entranced, gazed,