ing business on
Saturdays. There is a third state of affairs--perhaps the commonest: it
is necessary to keep the piece running for a certain number of weeks,
even at a loss, in order that it may visit the provinces and the
colonies or the States as a big London success that has enjoyed a long
run. Yet paying playgoers keep aloof.

What is the manager to do? If his house is but half full the applause
will be faint, the players are likely to act without spirit, and, worse
still, the audience may be chilled, and the members of it will tell
their friends that the house was almost empty, thereby causing them to
think that the entertainment is poor. So half full might become quite
empty. What method does the manager adopt? He knows that the general
public is as uncritical of an audience as of a play or of acting, so he
fills his house as well as he can with the very deadest of deadheads;
"orders" are distributed lavishly to people whose presence in the
theatre is actually a favour to the management.

It is said that these playgoers are peculiarly severe in their judgments
and remarkably apathetic! To the truth of part of this we can testify,
since we study such deadheads with great curiosity on the occasions,
rather rare, when we see them, for sometimes a dramatic critic gets
taken to the theatre by a friend. We think ourselves very famous, yet
most of us have friends ignorant of the fact that our trade is to
criticize plays. The position is a little quaint; one is asked to dine
at about the time that is customary to take afternoon tea; the dinner is
short though, if at a fashionable restaurant, the waits are long; and
there comes an awful moment when the host mentions that he has got six
stalls for the ----. Generally there is some friend present who knows
the true position, and exhibits a smile of fiendish mirth.

When this happens we examine the professional deadhead with interest. He
reminds one of the hired mourner at the Hebrew funeral. Fantastic
clothes, strange devices for keeping shirt-fronts clean, queer
contrivances for protecting the throat during the bus-ride home, furtive
umbrellas, ample reticules (in which perhaps goloshes are hidden), and a
genteel reticence in applause or laughter, are marks of the stranger in
the stalls--the harmless, necessary deadhead. He may not be ornamental,
nor even she, despite her sex; perhaps they give little encouragement to
the players; they bring nothing directly to the excheq