George took the ticket.  None of the city fathers or their fashionable sons had even invited him to dinner.  He went forth and had tea alone, while reading in an evening paper about the Austro-Serbian situation, in the tea-rooms attached to a cinema-palace.  The gorgeous rooms, throbbing to two-steps and fox-trots, were crammed with customers; but the waitresses behaved competently.  Thence he drove out in a taxi to the residence of Alderman Soulter.  He could see neither the Alderman nor Miss Soulter; he learnt that the condition of the patient was reassuring, and that the patient had a very good constitution.  Back at the hotel, he had to wait for dinner.  In due course he ate the customary desolating table-d’hote dinner which is served simultaneously in the vast, odorous dining-rooms, all furnished alike, of scores and scores of grand hotels throughout the provinces.  Having filled his cigar-case, he set out once more into the beautiful summer evening.  In broad Side Gate were massed the chief resorts of amusement.  The facade of the Empire music-hall glowed with great rubies and emeralds and amethysts and topazes in the fading light.  Its lure was more powerful than the lure of the ballad concert.  Ignoring his quasi-official duty to the greatest of sentimental contraltos, he pushed into the splendid foyer of the Empire.  One solitary stall, half a crown, was left for the second house; he bought it, eager in transgression; he felt that the ballad concert would have sent him mad.

The auditorium of the Empire was far larger than the auditorium of the town hall, and it was covered with gold.  The curving rows of plush-covered easy chairs extended backwards until faces became indistinguishable points in the smoke-misted gloom.  Every seat was occupied; the ballad concert had made no impression upon the music-hall.  The same stars that he could see in London appeared on the gigantic stage in the same songs and monologues; and as in London the indispensable revue was performed, but with a grosser and more direct licentiousness than the West End would have permitted.  And all proceeded with inexorable exactitude according to time-table.  And in scores and scores of similar Empires, Hippodromes, Alhambras, and Pavilions throughout the provinces, similar entertainments were proceeding with the same exactitude—­another example of the huge standardization of life.  George laughed with the best at the inventive drollery of the knock-about comedians—­Britain’s sole genuine contribution to the art of the modern stage.  But there were items in the Empire programme that were as awful in their tedium as anything at the ballad concert could be—­moments when George could not bear to look over the footlights.  And these items were applauded in ecstasy by the enchanted audience.  He thought of the stupidity, the insensibility, the sheer ignorance of the exalted lunchers; and he compared them with these qualities in the Empire audience, and asked himself sardonically whether all artists had lived in vain.  But the atmosphere of the Empire was comfortable, reassuring, inspiring.  The men had their pipes, cigarettes, and women; the women had the men, the luxury, the glitter, the publicity.  They had attained, they were happy.  The frightful curse of the provinces, ennui, had been conjured away by the beneficent and sublime institution invented, organized, and controlled by three great trusts.