Wasn’t he able to see that even the S. R. O. sign was up outside?

Standing room was not what Pape wanted—not with those patent pincers on his feet. Matter of fact, he wouldn’t have considered a stand-up view of anything. Before paying for the best orchestra seat they had—didn’t matter about the price—he’d like to know who was Zaza, just as folks outside were asking what was Why-Not.

The look of the man at the window accused him of being mildly insane. “Zaza’s Zaza” he observed, as he turned to his accounts.

“Naturally,” Pape replied. “But why not’s not always why. What I want to ask you is——”

“Leslie Carter play of same name set to music—not jazz—by French composer. House is packed to the roof to-night, as I’ve been trying to tell you from the start.”

Before Pape could offer other insistence he felt himself displaced before the window by a personage disguised in ornate livery.

“Mrs. Blackstone can’t attend. Sudden death,” said the personage. “She’d be obliged if you could sell these tickets and credit her account.”

“It is not Mrs. Blackstone herself who died?” was the official’s cold query.

“Indeed, no. She knows it’s late, sir, but she’d be obliged if you——”

“I’ll oblige her if the money changer won’t,” Pape interrupted. “I’ll take a ticket.”

The autocrat of the box office, however, shook his head. “Mrs. B’s box is grand tier. Can’t be split. Six chairs.”

From what so far had seemed a mere human huddle within one of the entrance doors, an eager figure hurried, just behind an eager voice.

“We are five person. How much dollar for five seats of thees box?”

At the little, oldish foreigner in large, newish ready-mades, Fate’s unhandyman looked; then on past the emotionful face to following emotionful faces. The human huddle had disintegrated from a mass of despair into animated units which now moved toward the box office as toward a magnet. Sounds of as many magpies filled the dignified silence—two French women and three men venting recitatives of hope that yet they might hear the Leoncavallo masterpiece. But them, too, the ticket man discouraged, doubtless the more emphatically because of their attire, which was poor, if proud.

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