The orchestra played a selection from the “Gondola Girl,” which was the leading musical-comedy of the moment.  Most of the audience, those in the more expensive seats at any rate, heard the same airs two or three times daily, at restaurant lunches, teas, dinners and suppers, and occasionally in the Park; they were justified therefore in treating the music as a background to slightly louder conversation than they had hitherto indulged in.  The music came to an end, episode number two in the evening’s entertainment was signalled, the curtain of Alexandrine blue rolled heavily upward, and a troupe of performing wolves was presented to the public.  Yeovil had encountered wolves in North Africa deserts and in Siberian forest and wold, he had seen them at twilight stealing like dark shadows across the snow, and heard their long whimpering howl in the darkness amid the pines; he could well understand how a magic lore had grown up round them through the ages among the peoples of four continents, how their name had passed into a hundred strange sayings and inspired a hundred traditions.  And now he saw them ride round the stage on tricycles, with grotesque ruffles round their necks and clown caps on their heads, their eyes blinking miserably in the blaze of the footlights.  In response to the applause of the house a stout, atrociously smiling man in evening dress came forward and bowed; he had had nothing to do either with the capture or the training of the animals, having bought them ready for use from a continental emporium where wild beasts were prepared for the music-hall market, but he continued bowing and smiling till the curtain fell.

Two American musicians with comic tendencies (denoted by the elaborate rags and tatters of their costumes) succeeded the wolves.  Their musical performance was not without merit, but their comic “business” seemed to have been invented long ago by some man who had patented a monopoly of all music-hall humour and forthwith retired from the trade.  Some day, Yeovil reflected, the rights of the monopoly might expire and new “business” become available for the knockabout profession.

The audience brightened considerably when item number five of the programme was signalled.  The orchestra struck up a rollicking measure and Tony Luton made his entrance amid a rousing storm of applause.  He was dressed as an errand-boy of some West End shop, with a livery and box-tricycle, as spruce and decorative as the most ambitious errand-boy could see himself in his most ambitious dreams.  His song was a lively and very audacious chronicle of life behind the scenes of a big retail establishment, and sparkled with allusions which might fitly have been described as suggestive—­at any rate they appeared to suggest meanings to the audience quite as clearly as Gorla Mustelford’s dances were likely to do, even with the aid, in her case, of long explanations on the programmes.  When the final verse seemed about to reach an unpardonable