Montague wondered, in an awestricken sort of way, what kind of human being it could be who had flourished the cane and made the grimaces in that play.  Later on, when ho came to know the “Tenderloin,” he met this same actor, and he found that he had begun life as a little Irish “mick” who lived in a tenement, and whoso mother stood at the head of the stairway and defended him with a rolling-pin against a policeman who was chasing him.  He had discovered that he could make a living by his comical antics; but when he came home and told his mother that he had been offered twenty dollars a week by a show manager, she gave him a licking for lying to her.  Now he was making three thousand dollars a week—­more than the President of the United States and his Cabinet; but he was not happy, as he confided to Montague, because he did not know how to read, and this was a cause of perpetual humiliation.  The secret desire of this little actor’s heart was to play Shakespeare; he had “Hamlet” read to him, and pondered how to act it—­all the time that he was flourishing his little cane and making his grimaces!  He had chanced to be on the stage when a fire had broken out, and five or six hundred victims of greed were roasted to death.  The actor had pleaded with the people to keep their seats, but all in vain; and all his life thereafter he went about with this vision of horror in his mind, and haunted by the passionate conviction that he had failed because of his lack of education—­that if only he had been a man of culture, he would have been able to think of something to say to hold those terror-stricken people!

At three o’clock in the morning the performance came to an end, and then there were more refreshments; and Mrs. Vivie Patton came and sat by him, and they had a nice comfortable gossip.  When Mrs. Vivie once got started at talking about people, her tongue ran on like a windmill.

There was Reggie Mann, meandering about and simpering at people.  Reggie was in his glory at Mrs. do Graffenricd’s affairs.  Reggie had arranged all this-he did the designing and the ordering, and contracted for the shows with the agents.  You could bet that ho had got his commission on them, too—­though sometimes Mrs. do Graffenricd got the shows to come for nothing, because of the advertising her name would bring.  Commissions wore Reggie’s speciality—­he had begun life as an auto agent.  Montague didn’t know what that was?  An auto agent was a man who was for ever begging his friends to use a certain kind of car, so that he might make a living; and Reggie had made about thirty thousand a year in that way.  He had come from Boston, where his reputation had been made by the fact that early one morning, as they were driving home from a celebration, he had dared a young society matron to take off her shoes and stockings, and get out and wade in the public fountain; and she had done it, and he had followed her.  On the strength of the eclat of this he had been taken up by Mrs.