"Not directly," said Toodles; "but tickets - and advertising. Why, men will hire front-row seats for a whole season, if they're interested in a girl in the show. And they'll take all their friends to see her, and she'll be talked about - she'll be somebody, instead of just nobody, as I was."

"Then it actually helps her on the stage!" said Montague.

"Helps her!" exclaimed Toodles. "My God! I've known a girl who'd been abroad with a tip-top swell - and had the gowns and the jewels to prove it - to come home and get into the front row of a chorus at a hundred dollars a week."

Toodles was cheerful and all unaware; and that only made the tragedy of it all one shade more black to Montague. He sat lost in sombre reverie, forgetting his companions, and the blare and glare of the place.

In the centre of this dining-room was a great cone-shaped stand, containing a display of food; and as they strolled out, Montague stopped to look at it. There were platters garnished with flowers and herbs, and containing roast turkeys and baked hams, jellied meats and game in aspic, puddings and tarts and frosted cakes - every kind of food-fantasticality imaginable. One might have spent an hour in studying it, and from top to bottom he would have found nothing simple, nothing natural. The turkeys had paper curls and rosettes stuck over them; the hams were covered with a white gelatine, the devilled crabs with a yellow mayonnaise-and all painted over in pink and green and black with landscapes and marine views - with "ships and shoes and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings." The jellied meats and the puddings were in the shape of fruits and flowers; and there were elaborate works of art in pink and white confectionery - a barn-yard, for instance, with horses and cows, and a pump, and a dairymaid - and one or two alligators.

And all this was changed every day! Each morning you might see a procession of a score of waiters bearing aloft a new supply. Montague remembered Betty Wyman's remark at their first interview, apropos of the whipped cream made into little curleques; how his brother had said, "If Allan were here, he'd be thinking about the man who fixed that cream, and how long it took him, and how he might have been reading 'The Simple Life'!"