I wandered round, exchanging a word or two with actors I had met before. On my travels I passed a woman six feet tall dressed in bright orange, a small lady in a tweed suit and a vast and flowery straw hat, and a man who had spilled sherry all down his shirt front. All the actors that nobody had ever heard of were still clustered together, shy and defensive, muttering anxiously to themselves. It amused me to think of those two whole separate worlds crowded into one room and not touching at any point; I knew a little of each world, myself, of the town with its doctors and farmers and landowners and headmasters, and of the theatre, with its pretty young men and its neurotic young women, and its bores and its stars, and I had nothing to do with either of them. I had nothing to do with anything, and yet I was there. What could be happier than that?

Just before the Mayor embarked on his speech, I noticed Sophy Brent. She was dressed in black, as I was, and she was all shiny and gay. She was talking to a group of pressmen, who were taking her photograph from time to time as she spoke. She was clearly in her element: she was made, one could tell, for that gluttonous negative machine.