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written scene for the benefit of an invisible audience from which Person, a dummy, kept turning away as if moved with his chair by Sherlock’s concealed landlady, no matter how he sat or where he looked in the course of the brief but boozy interview. It was indeed all sham and waxworks as compared to the reality of Armande, whose image was stamped on the eye of his mind and shone through the show at various levels, sometimes upside down, sometimes on the teasing marge of his field of vision, but always there, always, true and thrilling. The commonplaces he and she had exchanged blazed with authenticity when placed for display against the forced guffaws in the bogus bar.
    “Well, you certainly look remarkably fit,” said Hugh with effusive mendacity after the drinks had been ordered.
    Baron R. had coarse features, a sallow complexion, a lumpy nose with enlarged pores, shaggy bellicose eyebrows, an unerring stare, and a bulldog mouth full of bad teeth. The streak of nasty inventiveness so conspicuous in his writings also appeared in the prepared parts of his speech, as when he said, as he did now, that far from “looking fit” he felt more and more a creeping resemblance to the cinema star Reubenson who once played old gangsters in Florida-staged films; but no such actor existed.
    “Anyway—how are you?” asked Hugh, pressing his disadvantage.
    “To make a story quite short,” replied Mr. R. (who had an exasperating way not only of trotting out hackneyed formulas in his would-be colloquial thickly accented English, but also of getting them wrong), “I had not been feeling any too healthy, you know, during the winter. My liver, you know, was holding something against me.”
    He took a long sip of whiskey, and, rinsing his mouth with it in a manner Person had never yet witnessed, very slowly replaced his glass on the low table. Then,
à deux
with the muzzled stuff, he swallowed it and shifted to his second English style, the grand one of his most memorable characters:
    “Insomnia and her sister Nocturia harry me, of course, but otherwise I am as hale as a pane of stamps. I don’t think you met Mr. Tamworth. Person, pronounced Parson; and Tamworth: like the English breed of black-blotched swine.”
    “No,” said Hugh, “it does not come from Parson, but rather from Peterson.”
    “O.K., son. And how’s Phil?”
    They discussed briefly R.’s publisher’s vigor, charm, and acumen.
    “Except that he wants me to write the wrong books. He wants——” assuming a coy throaty voice as he named the titles of a competitor’s novels, also published by Phil—“he wants
A Boy for Pleasure
but would settle for
The Slender Slut
, and all
I
can offer him is not
Tralala
but the first and dullest tome of my
Tralatitions.
”
    “I assure you that he is waiting for the manuscript with utmost impatience. By the way——”
    By the way, indeed! There ought to exist some rhetorical term for that twist of nonlogic. A unique view througha black weave ran by the way. By the way, I shall lose my mind if I do not get her.
    “—by the way, I met a person yesterday who has just seen your stepdaughter——”
    “Former stepdaughter,” corrected Mr. R. “Quite a time no see, and I hope it remains so. Same stuff, son” (this to the barman).
    “The occasion was rather remarkable. Here was this young woman, reading——”
    “Excuse me,” said the secretary warmly, and folding a note he had just scribbled, passed it to Hugh.
    “Mr. R. resents all mention of Miss Moore and her mother.”
    And I don’t blame him. But where was Hugh’s famous tact? Giddy Hugh knew quite well the whole situation, having got it from Phil, not Julia, an impure but reticent little girl.
    This part of our translucing is pretty boring, yet we must complete our report.
    Mr. R. had discovered one day, with the help of a hired follower, that his wife Marion was having an affair with Christian Pines, son of the well-known cinema man who had directed the