of persons who indulged in music exactly as he indulged in music.  He had no traffic with the unfamiliar.  Unfamiliar items on a programme displeased him.  He had heard compositions by Richard Strauss, but he could make nothing of them, and his timid, untravelled taste feared to like them.  Mr. Enwright himself was mainly inimical to Strauss, as to most of modern Germany, perhaps because of the new architecture in Berlin.  George knew that there existed young English composers with such names as Cyril Scott, Balfour Gardiner, Donald Tovey—­for he had seen these names recently on the front page of The Daily Telegraph—­but he had never gone to the extent of listening to their works.  He was entirely sure that they could not hold a candle to Wagner, and his sub-conscious idea was that it was rather like their cheek to compose at all.  He had not noticed that Hugo Wolf had just died, nor indeed had he noticed that Hugo Wolf had ever lived.

Nevertheless this lofty and exclusive adherent of the ‘best’ music was not prejudiced in advance against The Gay Spark.  He was anxious to enjoy it and he expected to enjoy it. The Gay Spark had already an enormous prestige; it bore the agreeable, captivating label of Vienna; and immense sums were being made out of it in all the capitals of the world.  George did not hope for immortal strains, but he anticipated a distinguished, lilting gaiety, and in the ‘book’ a witty and cosmopolitan flavour that would lift the thing high above such English musical comedies as he had seen.  It was impossible that a work of so universal and prodigious a vogue should not have unquestionable virtues.

The sight of the red-nosed comedian rather shocked George, who had supposed that red-nosed comedians belonged to the past.  However, the man was atoned for by three extremely beautiful and graceful young girls who followed him.  Round about the small group was ranged a semicircle of handsome creatures in long skirts, behind whom was another semicircle of young men in white flannels; the scene was a street in Mandalay.  The red-nosed comedian began by making a joke concerning his mother-in-law, and another concerning mendacious statements to his wife to explain his nocturnal absences from home, and another concerning his intoxicated condition.  The three extremely beautiful and graceful young girls laughed deliriously at the red-nosed comedian; they replied in a similar vein.  They clasped his neck and kissed him rapturously, and thereupon he sang a song, of which the message was that all three extremely beautiful and graceful girls practised professionally the most ancient and stable of feminine vocations; the girls, by means of many refrains, confirmed this definition of their status in society.  Then the four of them danced, and there was enthusiastic applause from every part of the house except the semicircle of European odalisques lost, for some unexplained reason, in Mandalay.  These ladies, the indubitable physical attractions of each of whom were known by the management to fill five or six stalls every night, took no pains whatever to hide that they were acutely bored by the whole proceedings.  Self-sufficient in their beauty, deeply aware of the power of their beauty, they deigned to move a lackadaisical arm or leg at intervals in accordance with the respectful suggestions of the conductor.