ad
noticed that he himself could make more money in one necktie than
in another, and he would instinctively take particular care in the
morning choice of a cravat on days when he meditated a great coup.

"Why don't you get one?" Marrier suggested.

"Do you really think I could?" asked Carlo Trent, as if the
possibility were shimmering far out of his reach like a rainbow.

"Rather!" smiled Harrier. "I don't mind laying a fiver that Mr.
Machin's dressing-gown came from Drook's in Old Bond Street." But
instead of saying "Old" he said "Ehoold."

"It did," Edward Henry admitted.

Mr. Marrier beamed with satisfaction.

"Drook's, you say," murmured Carlo Trent. "Old Bond Street," and wrote
down the information on his shirt cuff.

Rose Euclid watched him write.

"Yes, Carlo," said she. "But don't you think we'd better begin to talk
about the theatre? You haven't told me yet if you got hold of Longay
on the 'phone."

"Of course we got hold of him," said Marrier. "He agrees with me that
'The Intellectual' is a better name for it."

Rose Euclid clapped her hands.

"I'm so glad!" she cried. "Now what do _you_ think of it as a name,
Mr. Machin--'The Intellectual Theatre'? You see it's most important we
should settle on the name, isn't it?"

It is no exaggeration to say that Edward Henry felt a wave of cold
in the small of his back, and also a sinking away of the nevertheless
quite solid chair on which he sat. He had more than the typical
Englishman's sane distrust of that morbid word 'Intellectual.' His
attitude towards it amounted to active dislike. If ever he used it, he
would on no account use it alone; he would say, "Intellectual and all
that sort of thing!" with an air of pushing violently away from him
everything that the phrase implied. The notion of baptizing a theatre
with the fearsome word horrified him. Still, he had to maintain
his nerve and his repute. So he drank some champagne, and smiled
nonchalantly as the imperturbable duellist smiles while the pistols
are being examined.

"Well--" he murmured.

"You see," Marrier broke in, with the smile ecstatic, almost dancing
on his chair. "There's no use in compromise. Compromise is and always
has been the curse of this country. The unintellectual drahma is
dead--dead. Naoobody can deny that. All the box-offices in the West
are proclaiming it--"

"Should you call your play intellectual, Mr. Sachs?" Edward Henry
inquired across the table.

"I scarcely kno