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it to you. It’s a fantasy.”
    “God!”
    “Here is Dr. Forster’s letter, and one enclosed from a Dr. James Ackrington who appears to be a celebrity from Harley Street. Perhaps you’d like to read them.”
    “I should hate to read them.”
    “I think you’d better, sir.”
    Gaunt grimaced, took the letters and lowered himself into a chair by the writing desk. Dikon watched him rather nervously.
    Geoffrey Gaunt had spent twenty-seven of his forty-five years on the stage, and the last sixteen had seen him firmly established in the first rank. He was what used to be called a romantic actor, but he was also an intelligent one. His greatest distinction lay in his genius for making an audience hear the sense as well as the music of Shakespearean verse. So accurate and clear was his tracing out of the speeches’ content that his art had about it something of mathematical precision and was saved from coldness only by the apparent profundity of his emotional understanding. How far this understanding was instinctive and how far intellectual, not even his secretary, who had been with him for six years, could decide. He was middle-sized, dark, and not particularly striking, but as an actor he possessed the two great assets: his skull was well shaped, and his hands were beautiful. As for his disposition, Dikon Bell, writing six years before from London to a friend in New Zealand, had said, after a week in Gaunt’s employment: “He’s tricky, affected, clever as a bagful of monkeys, a bit of a bounder with the temper of a fury, and no end of an egotist, but I think I’m going to like him.” He had never found reason to revise this first impression.
    Gaunt read Dr. Forster’s note and then Dr. Ackrington’s letter. “For heaven’s sake,” he cried, “what sort of an antic is this old person? Have you noted the acid treatment of his relations? Does he call this letter a recommendation? Discomfort leavened with inefficient kindness is the bait he offers. Moreover, there’s a dirty little knock at me in the last paragraph. If Forster wants me to endure the place, one would have thought his policy would have been to suppress the letter. He’s a poor psychologist.”
    “The psychology,” said Dikon modestly, “is mine. Forster wanted to suppress the letter. I took it upon myself to show it to you. I thought that if you jibbed at the Claires, sir, you wouldn’t be able to resist Dr. Ackrington.”
    Gaunt shot a suspicious glance at his secretary. “You’re too clever by half, my friend,” he said.
    “And he
does
say,” Dikon added persuasively, “he
does
say ‘the mud may be miraculous.’ ”
    Gaunt laughed, made an abrupt movement, and drew in his breath sharply.
    “Isn’t it worth enduring the place if it puts your leg right, sir? And at least we could get on with the boek.”
    “Certain it is I can’t write in this bloody hotel.
How
I hate hotels. Dikon,” cried Gaunt with an assumption of boyish enthusiasm, “shall we fly to America? Shall we do
Henry Vth
in New York? They’d take it, you know, just now. ‘
And Crispin, Crispian shall ne’er go by
…’ God, I think I must play
Henry
in New York.”
    “Wouldn’t you rather play him in London, sir, on a fit-up stage with the blitz for battle noises off?”
    “Of course I would, damn you.”
    “Why not try this place? At least it may turn out to be copy for the Life. Thermal
divertissements
. And then, when you’re fit and ready to hit ’em… London.”
    “You talk like a Nanny in her dotage,” said Gaunt fretfully. “I suppose you and Colly have plotted this frightfulness between you. Where is Colly?”
    “Ironing your trousers, sir.”
    “Tell him to come here.”
    Dikon spoke on the telephone and in a moment the door opened to admit a wisp of a man with a face that resembled a wrinkled kid glove. This was Gaunt’s dresser and personal servant, Alfred Colly. Colly had been the dresser provided by the management when Gaunt, a promising