Chapter

 1.  The promenade

 2.  The power

 3.  The flat

 4.  Confidence

 5.  Ostend

 6.  The Albany

 7.  For the empire

 8.  Boots

 9.  The club

10.  The mission

11.  The telegram

12.  Rendezvous

13.  In committee

14.  Queen

15.  Evening out

16.  The virgin

17.  Sunday afternoon

18.  The mystic

19.  The visit

20.  Mascot

21.  The leave-train

22.  Getting on with the war

23.  The call

24.  The soldier

25.  The ring

26.  The return

27.  The Clyde

28.  Salome

29.  The streets

30.  The child’s arm

31.  “Romance”

32.  Mrs. Braiding

33.  The roof

34.  In the boudoir

35.  Queen dead

36.  Collapse

37.  The invisible powers

38.  The victory

39.  Idyll

40.  The window

41.  The envoy

Chapter I

THE PROMENADE

The piece was a West End success so brilliant that even if you belonged to the intellectual despisers of the British theatre you could not hold up your head in the world unless you had seen it; even for such as you it was undeniably a success of curiosity at least.

The stage scene flamed extravagantly with crude orange and viridian light, a rectangle of bedazzling illumination; on the boards, in the midst of great width, with great depth behind them and arching height above, tiny squeaking figures ogled the primeval passion in gesture and innuendo.  From the arc of the upper circle convergent beams of light pierced through gloom and broke violently on this group of the half-clad lovely and the swathed grotesque.  The group did not quail.  In fullest publicity it was licensed to say that which in private could not be said where men and women meet, and that which could not be printed.  It gave a voice to the silent appeal of pictures and posters and illustrated weeklies all over the town; it disturbed the silence of the most secret groves in the vast, undiscovered hearts of men and women young and old.  The half-clad lovely were protected from the satyrs in the audience by an impalpable screen made of light and of ascending