a dozen unworn peat-perfumed suits of tweed flung behind him any lingering doubt about there being something in success, and with the recapture of his enthusiasm for what he called "jolly things" was anxious that Maud should share in it.

"Do you think these new things are a success, Maud?" he asked, perhaps a little too boisterously. At any rate, the parlor-maid's comprehension of valeting had apparently never been so widely stretched, for a faint coralline blush tinted her waxen cheeks.

"They seem very nice, sir," she murmured, with a slight stress upon the verb.

John felt that he had trespassed too far upon the confines of Maud's humanity and retreated hurriedly. He would have liked to explain that his inquiry had merely been a venture into abstract esthetics and that he had not had the least intention of extracting her opinion about these suits on him; but he felt that an attempt at explanation would embarrass her, and he hummed instead over a selection of ties, as a bee hums from flower to flower in a garden, careless of the gardener who close at hand is potting up plants.

"I will take these ties," he announced on the last stave of A Fine Old English Gentleman.

Maud noted them gravely.

"And I shall have a few books. Perhaps there won't be room for them?"

"There won't be room for them, not in your dressing-case, sir."

"Oh, I know there won't be room in that," said John, bitterly.

His dressing-case might be considered the medal he had struck in honor of The Fall of Babylon: he had passed it every morning on his way to rehearsals and, dreaming of the triumph that might soon be his, had vowed he would buy it were such a triumph granted. It had cost £75, was heavy enough when empty to strain his wrist and when full to break his back, and it contained more parasites of the toilet table and the writing desk than one could have supposed imaginable. These parasites each possessed an abode of such individual shape that leaving them behind made no difference to the number of really useful articles, like pajamas, that could be carried in the cubic space lined with blue corded silk on which they looked down like the inconvenient houses of a fashionable square. Therefore wherever John went, the fittings went too, a glittering worthless mob of cut-glass, pigskin, tortoiseshell and ivory.

"But in my portmanteau," 

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