Mr. Prohack could not bear the spectacle of Ozzie’s discomfiture.  His sad weakness for pleasing people overcame him, and, putting his hand benevolently on the young man’s shoulder, he said: 

“My dear fellow, personally I’m dying to go.”

They went by strangely narrow corridors and through iron doors across the stage, whose shirt-sleeved, ragged population seemed to be behaving as though the last trump had sounded, and so upstairs and along a broad passage full of doors ajar from which issued whispers and exclamations and transient visions of young women.  From the star’s dressing-room, at the end, a crowd of all sorts and conditions of persons was being pushed.  Mr. Prohack trembled with an awful apprehension, and asked himself vainly what in the name of commonsense he was doing there, and prayed that Ozzie might be refused admission.  The next moment he was being introduced to a middle-aged woman in a middle-aged dressing-gown.  Her face was thickly caked with paint and powder, her eyes surrounded with rings of deepest black, her finger-nails red.  Mr. Prohack, not without difficulty, recognised Eliza.  A dresser stood on either side of her.  Blinding showers of electric light poured down upon her defenceless but hardy form.  She shook hands, but Mr. Prohack deemed that she ought to bear a notice:  “Danger.  Visitors are requested not to touch.”

“So good of you to come round,” she said, in her rich and powerful voice, smiling with all her superb teeth.  Mr. Prohack, entranced, gazed, not as at a woman, but as at a public monument.  Nevertheless he thought that she was not a bad kind, and well suited for the rough work of the world.

“I hope you’re all coming to my ball to-night,” said she.  Mr. Prohack had never heard of any ball.  In an instant she told him that she had remarked two most charming ladies with him in the box—­(inordinate faculty of observation, mused Mr. Prohack)—­and in another instant she was selling him three two guinea tickets for a grand ball and rout in aid of the West End Chorus Girls’ Aid Association.  Could he refuse, perceiving so clearly as he did that within the public monument was hiding a wistful creature, human like himself, human like his wife and daughter?  He could not.

“Now you’ll come?” said she.

Mr. Prohack swore that he would come, his heart sinking as he realised the consequence of his own foolish weakness.  There was a knock at the door.

“Did you want me, Liza?” said a voice, and a fat gentleman, clothed with resplendent correctness, stepped into the room.  It was the stage-manager, a god in his way.

Eliza Fiddle became a cyclone.

“I should think I did want you,” she said passionately.  “That’s why I sent for you, and next time I’ll ask you to come quicker.  I’m not going to have that squint-eyed girl on the stage any more to-night.  You know, the one at the end of the row.  Twice she spoiled my exit by getting in the way.  And you’ve got to throw her out, and take it from me.  She does it on purpose.”