t
never owned a chairman who announced the willingness of each successive
comedian to oblige with a song. Old men never said they remembered the
Orient in the jolly old days, for they could not have forgotten it. In
essentials it remained the same as ever. Dancers had gone; beauties had
shrivelled; but their ghosts haunted the shadowy interior. The
silver-footed _coryphees_ now kept lodging-houses; the swan-like
Ballerinas wore elastic stockings; but their absence was filled by
others: they were as little missed as the wave that has broken. The lean
old vanities quizzed and ogled the frail ladies of the Promenade and
sniffed the smoke-wreathed air with a thought of pleasures once worth
enjoyment. They spent now an evening of merely sentimental dissipation,
but because it was spent at the Orient, not entirely wasted; for the
unchanged theater testified to the reality of their youth. It may not
have been able to rejuvenate them, but, as by a handkerchief that
survives the departure of its owner, their senses were faintly
stimulated.

The Orient was proud because it did not enter into competition with any
other house of varieties; preened itself upon a cosmopolitan programme.
With the snobbishness of an old city firm, it declined to advertise its
ware with eye-arresting posters, and congratulated itself on the
inability to secure new clients. Foreigners made up a large proportion
of the audience, and were apparently contented by equestrian mistresses
of the _haute ecole_, by bewildering assemblages of jugglers, even by
continental mediocrities for the sake of hearing their native tongue.
They did not object to interminable wire-acts, and put up with
divination feats of the most exhausting dullness. After all, these
incidental turns must occur; but the ballets were the feature of the
evening. For many who visited the Orient, the stream of prostitutes
ebbing and flowing upon the Promenade was enough. Yet the women of the
Orient Promenade would strike a cynic with uneasiness.

Under the stars, the Piccadilly courtesans affect the onlooker less
atrociously. Night lends a magic of softness to their fretful beauty.
The sequins lose their garishness; the painted faces preserve an
illusion of reality. Moonlight falls gently on the hollow cheek;
kindles a spark of youth in the leaden eye. The Piccadilly courtesans
move like tigers in a tropic gloom with velvet blazonries and a stealthy
splendor that masks the hunger driving them