he would have been fully aware that Oswald Morfey was a person of importance in the West End of London, that he was an outstanding phenomenon of the age, that he followed very closely all the varying curves of the great world-movement, that he was constantly to be seen on the pavements of Piccadilly, Bond Street, St. James’s Street, Pall Mall and Hammersmith, that he was never absent from a good first night or a private view of very new or very old pictures or a distinguished concert or a poetry-reading or a fashionable auction at Christie’s, that he received invitations to dinner for every night in the week and accepted all those that did not clash with the others, that in return for these abundant meals he gave about once a month a tea-party in his trifling Japanese flat in Bruton Street, where the sandwiches were as thin as the sound of the harpsichord which eighteenth century ladies played at his request; and that he was in truth what Mr. Asprey Chown called “social secretary” to Mr. Asprey Chown.

Mr. Prohack might be excused for his ignorance of this last fact, for the relation between Asprey Chown and Ozzie was never very clearly defined—­at any rate by Ozzie.  He had no doubt learned, from an enforced acquaintance with the sides of motor-omnibuses, that Mr. Asprey Chown was a theatre-manager of some activity, but he certainly had not truly comprehended that Mr. Asprey Chown was head of one of the two great rival theatrical combines and reputed to be the most accomplished showman in the Western hemisphere, with a jewelled finger in notable side-enterprises such as prize-fights, restaurants, and industrial companies.  The knowing ones from whom naught is hidden held that Asprey Chown had never given a clearer proof of genius than in engaging this harmless and indefatigable parasite of the West End to be his social secretary.  The knowing ones said further that whereas Ozzie was saving money, nobody could be sure that Asprey Chown was saving money.  The engagement had a double effect—­it at once put Asprey Chown into touch with everything that could be useful to him for the purposes of special booming, and it put Ozzie into touch with half the theatrical stars of London—­in an age when a first-rate heroine of revue was worth at least two duchesses and a Dame in the scale of social values.

Mr. Oswald Morfey, doubtless in order to balance the modernity of his taste in the arts, wore a tight black stock and a wide eyeglass ribbon in the daytime, and in the evening permitted himself to associate a soft silk shirt with a swallow-tail coat.  It was to Mr. Prohack’s secondary (and more exclusive) club that he belonged.  Inoffensive though he was, he had managed innocently to offend Mr. Prohack.  “Who is the fellow?” Mr. Prohack had once asked a friend in the club, and having received no answer but “Ozzie,” Mr. Prohack had added:  “He’s a perfect ass,” and had given as a reason for this harsh judgment:  “Well, I can’t stick the way he walks across the hall.”