‘Ye-es,’ said Bat dreamily, after Morgiana had given ‘the nasty jar’ to the Forty Thieves in their forty oil ‘combinations.’  ’As you say, I’ve got ’em and I can hold ’em.  What a man does doesn’t matter much; and how he does it don’t matter either.  It’s the when—­the psychological moment.  ’Press can’t make up for it; money can’t; brains can’t.  A lot’s luck, but all the rest is genius.  I’m not speaking about My people now.  I’m talking of Myself.’

Then ’Dal—­she was the only one who dared—­knocked at the door and stood behind us all alive and panting as Morgiana.  Lafone was carrying the police-court scene, and the house was ripped up crossways with laughter.

‘Ah!  Tell a fellow now,’ she asked me for the twentieth time, ’did you love Nellie Farren when you were young?’

‘Did we love her?’ I answered. ’"If the earth and the sky and the sea”—­There were three million of us, ‘Dal, and we worshipped her.’

‘How did she get it across?’ Dal went on.

‘She was Nellie.  The houses used to coo over her when she came on.’

‘I’ve had a good deal, but I’ve never been cooed over yet,’ said ’Dal wistfully.

‘It isn’t the how, it’s the when,’ Bat repeated.  ‘Ah!’

He leaned forward as the house began to rock and peal full-throatedly.  ’Dal fled.  A sinuous and silent procession was filing into the police-court to a scarcely audible accompaniment.  It was dressed—­but the world and all its picture-palaces know how it was dressed.  It danced and it danced, and it danced the dance which bit all humanity in the leg for half a year, and it wound up with the lockstep finale that mowed the house down in swathes, sobbing and aching.  Somebody in the gallery moaned, ‘Oh Gord, the Gubby!’ and we heard the word run like a shudder, for they had not a full breath left among them.  Then ’Dal came on, an electric star in her dark hair, the diamonds flashing in her three-inch heels—­a vision that made no sign for thirty counted seconds while the police-court scene dissolved behind her into Morgiana’s Manicure Palace, and they recovered themselves.  The star on her forehead went out, and a soft light bathed her as she took—­slowly, slowly to the croon of adoring strings—­the eighteen paces forward.  We saw her first as a queen alone; next as a queen for the first time conscious of her subjects, and at the end, when her hands fluttered, as a woman delighted, awed not a little, but transfigured and illuminated with sheer, compelling affection and goodwill.  I caught the broken mutter of welcome—­the coo which is more than tornadoes of applause.  It died and rose and died again lovingly.

‘She’s got it across,’ Bat whispered.  ’I’ve never seen her like this.  I told her to light up the star, but I was wrong, and she knew it.  She’s an artist.’

‘’Dal, you darling!’ some one spoke, not loudly but it carried through the house.