ed up and down this passage twenty
times in the blaze of all the lamps, in the glare of all the eyes. He
did not go and hide in dim corners where suspicion might have searched
for him. He kept constantly on the move in the lighted corridors, and
everywhere that he went he seemed to be there by right. Don't ask me
what he was like; you have seen him yourself six or seven times tonight.
You were waiting with all the other grand people in the reception room
at the end of the passage there, with the terrace just beyond. Whenever
he came among you gentlemen, he came in the lightning style of a waiter,
with bent head, flapping napkin and flying feet. He shot out on to the
terrace, did something to the table cloth, and shot back again towards
the office and the waiters' quarters. By the time he had come under the
eye of the office clerk and the waiters he had become another man in
every inch of his body, in every instinctive gesture. He strolled among
the servants with the absent-minded insolence which they have all seen
in their patrons. It was no new thing to them that a swell from the
dinner party should pace all parts of the house like an animal at the
Zoo; they know that nothing marks the Smart Set more than a habit of
walking where one chooses. When he was magnificently weary of walking
down that particular passage he would wheel round and pace back past
the office; in the shadow of the arch just beyond he was altered as by
a blast of magic, and went hurrying forward again among the Twelve
Fishermen, an obsequious attendant. Why should the gentlemen look at
a chance waiter? Why should the waiters suspect a first-rate walking
gentleman? Once or twice he played the coolest tricks. In the
proprietor's private quarters he called out breezily for a syphon of
soda water, saying he was thirsty. He said genially that he would carry
it himself, and he did; he carried it quickly and correctly through the
thick of you, a waiter with an obvious errand. Of course, it could not
have been kept up long, but it only had to be kept up till the end of
the fish course.

"His worst moment was when the waiters stood in a row; but even then he
contrived to lean against the wall just round the corner in such a way
that for that important instant the waiters thought him a gentleman,
while the gentlemen thought him a waiter. The rest went like winking. If
any waiter caught him away from the table, that waiter caught a languid
aristocrat. He had o