The impact of the lady on this gentleman was terrific.

“Look, look!” he said.  “That’s Ella Reeve, one of my discoveries.  She was principal boy at Blackpool two years ago.  I put her there.  She got fifteen pounds a week, and to-day she gets two hundred.  I spotted her in a chorus, asked her to call and see me, and this is the result.  I made her.  There’s nothing she wouldn’t do for me, she’s so grateful.  If she knew I was in the room she’d be over here in a jiffy.”

Having told us all this, he, being a very normal man, told it again, all the while craning his neck in the hope that his old client (she had now, it seemed, passed out of his hands, having forsaken panto for London and revue) might catch sight of his dear face.  But she was far too much occupied either with the lobster on her plate or with the yellow fluid, strange to me, that moved restlessly in a long-stemmed shallow glass at her side.

And then, being, as I say, not in any way an eccentric or exorbitant character, the agent told it us a third time, with a digression here and there as to the deep friendships that members of his profession could form and cement if only they were decent fellows and not mere money-grubbing machines out for nothing but their commission.  “That’s what the wise man does,” he concluded; “he makes real friends with his clients, such as I did with Ella Reeve.  The result is we never had any hitches, and there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for me.  She’s a darling!”

Getting a little tired of this, but obviously anything but unwilling to shake the new star’s slender hand and listen to the vivacious flow of speech from such attractive lips, my friend said at last, “Well, as you and she are such pals, and as she has only to know that you are here to jump over the tables to get to you, why not send your card to her?”

The agent agreed, and we watched the waiter threading his way among the tables towards that one at which the new and grateful star was seated and hand the card to her.

The end of this story is so tragic that I should prefer not to tell it.

Ella Reeve took the card, read it, laid it down, and resumed conversation with her friends.  She did not even glance in our direction.

I felt sorry for the agent, whose mortification was very real, though he made a brave effort to carry it off; and now that he is dead I feel sorrier.  As for Ella Reeve (which is not really her name, but one which with great ingenuity I devised for her from the French:  thus, Elle arrive) I often see her, under her true style, in her triumphs, and I always wonder whether her treatment of the agent, or his assurance of her dependence on his cordiality, represents more nearly the truth.  She looks such a good sort.  Some day, when the War is over, I must acquire a shiny tall hat and a glossy shirt front and a youthful manner and get someone to introduce me, and then, bit by bit, extract the truth.