of advertising could wheedle into the box-office.  When the climax came, Llewellyn usually went to hospital and received the reporters of local papers in pathetic audience there, which counteracted the effect of the astounding statements the stars made in letters to the editor, and yet gave the public clearly to understand that owing to its coldness and neglect a number of ladies and gentlemen of very superior talents were subsisting in their midst mainly upon brinjals and soda-water.  “I’m in hospital,” Mr. Stanhope would say to the reporters, “and I’m d——­ glad of it,”—­he always insisted on the oath going in, it appealed so sympathetically to the domiciled Englishman grown cold to superiority,—­“for, upon my soul, I don’t know where I’d turn for a crust if I weren’t.”  In the end the talented ladies and gentlemen usually went home by an inexpensive line as the voluntary arrangement of a public to whom plain soda was a ludicrous hardship, and native vegetables an abomination at any price.  Then Llewellyn and Rosa Norton—­she had a small inalienable income, and they were really married though they preferred for some inexplicable reason to be thought guilty of less conventional behaviour—­would depart in another direction, full of gratification for the present and of confidence for the future.  Llewellyn usually made a parting statement to the newspapers that although his aims were unalterably high he was not above profiting by experience, and that next season he could be relied upon to hit the taste of the community with precision.  This year, as we know, he had made a serious effort by insisting that at least a proportion of his ladies and gentlemen should be high-kickers and equal to an imitation, good enough for the Orient, of most things done by the illustrious Mr. Chevalier.  But the fact that Mr. Stanhope had selected The Offence of Galilee to open with tells its own tale.  He was convinced, but not converted, and he stood there with his little legs apart, chewing a straw above the three uncut emeralds that formed the chaste decoration of his shirt-front, giving the public of Calcutta one more chance to redeem itself.

It began to look as if Calcutta were not wholly irredeemable.  A ticca-gharry deposited a sea-captain; three carriages arrived in succession; an indefinite number of the Duke’s Own, hardly any of them drunk, filed in to the rupee seats under the gallery:  an overflow from Jimmy Finnigan, who could no longer give his patrons even standing room.  When this occurred Llewellyn turned and swung indifferently away in the direction of the dressing-rooms.  When Jimmy Finnigan closed his doors so early there was no further cause for anxiety.  Calcutta was abroad and stirring, and would turn for amusement even to The Offence of Galilee.