Everyone knows the Gold Rooms at the Grand Babylon on the Embankment.

They are immense, splendid, and gorgeous; they possess more gold leaf

to the square inch than any music-hall in London. They were designed

to throw the best possible light on humanity in the mass, to

illuminate effectively not only the shoulders of women, but also the

sombreness of men's attire. Not a tint on their walls that has not

been profoundly studied and mixed and laid with a view to the great

aim. Wherefore, when the electric clusters glow in the ceiling, and

the "after-dinner" band (that unique corporation of British citizens

disguised as wild Hungarians) breathes and pants out its after-dinner

melodies from the raised platform in the main salon, people regard

this coup d'oeil with awe, and feel glad that they are in the dazzling

picture, and even the failures who are there imagine that they have

succeeded. Wherefore, also, the Gold Rooms of the Grand Babylon are

expensive, and only philanthropic societies, plutocrats, and the

Titans of the theatrical world may persuade themselves that they can

afford to engage them.

It was very late when I arrived at my cousin Sullivan's much

advertised reception. I had wished not to go at all, simply because I

was inexperienced and nervous; but both he and his wife were so

good-natured and so obviously anxious to be friendly, that I felt

bound to appear, if only for a short time. As I stood in the first

room, looking vaguely about me at the lively throng of resplendent

actresses who chattered and smiled so industriously and with such

abundance of gesture to the male acquaintances who surrounded them, I

said to myself that I was singularly out of place there.

I didn't know a soul, and the stream of arrivals having ceased,

neither Sullivan nor Emmeline was immediately visible. The moving

picture was at once attractive and repellent to me. It became

instantly apparent that the majority of the men and women there had

but a single interest in life, that of centring attention upon

themselves; and their various methods of reaching this desirable end

were curious and wonderful in the extreme. For all practical purposes,

they were still on the boards which they had left but an hour or two

before. It seemed as if they regarded the very orchestra in the light

of a specially contrived accompaniment to their several actions and

movements. As they glanced carelessly at me, I felt that they held me

as a foreigner, as one outside that incredible little world of theirs

which they call "the profession." And so I felt crushed, with a faint

resemblance to a worm. You see, I was young.

I walked through towards the main salon, and in the doorway between

the two rooms I met a girl of striking appearance, who was followed by

two others. I knew her face well, having seen it often in photograph

shops; it was the face of Marie Deschamps, the popular divette of the

Diana Theatre, the leading lady of Sullivan's long-lived musical

comedy, "My Queen." I needed no second glance to convince me that Miss

Deschamps was a very important personage indeed, and, further, that a

large proportion of her salary of seventy-five pounds a week was

expended in the suits and trappings of triumph. If her dress did not

prove that she was on the topmost bough of the tree, then nothing

could. Though that night is still recent history, times have changed.

Divettes could do more with three hundred a month then than they can

with eight hundred now.




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