was but an item in the program,
amidst the more thrilling incidents--to Mr. May--of conjurors,
popular songs, five-minute farces, performing birds, and comics. Mr.
May was too human to believe that a show should consist entirely of
the dithering eye-ache of a film.

He was becoming really depressed by his failure to find any opening.
He had his family to keep--and though his honesty was of the variety
sort, he had a heavy conscience in the direction of his wife and
daughter. Having been so long in America, he had acquired American
qualities, one of which was this heavy sort of private innocence,
coupled with complacent and natural unscrupulousness in "matters of
business." A man of some odd sensitiveness in material things, he
liked to have his clothes neat and spick, his linen immaculate, his
face clean-shaved like a cherub. But alas, his clothes were now
old-fashioned, so that their rather expensive smartness was
detrimental to his chances, in spite of their scrupulous look of
having come almost new out of the bandbox that morning. His rather
small felt hats still curved jauntily over his full pink face. But
his eyes looked lugubrious, as if he felt he had not deserved so
much bad luck, and there were bilious lines beneath them.

So Mr. May, in his room in the Moon and Stars, which was the best inn
in Woodhouse--he must have a good hotel--lugubriously considered his
position. Woodhouse offered little or nothing. He must go to Alfreton.
And would he find anything there? Ah, where, where in this hateful
world was there refuge for a man saddled with responsibilities, who
wanted to do his best and was given no opportunity? Mr. May had
travelled in his Pullman car and gone straight to the best hotel in the
town, like any other American with money--in America. He had done it
smart, too. And now, in this grubby penny-picking England, he saw his
boots being worn-down at the heel, and was afraid of being stranded
without cash even for a railway ticket. If he had to clear out without
paying his hotel bill--well, that was the world's fault. He had to
live. But he must perforce keep enough in hand for a ticket to
Birmingham. He always said his wife was in London. And he always walked
down to Lumley to post his letters. He was full of evasions.

So again he walked down to Lumley to post his letters. And he looked
at Lumley. And he found it a damn god-forsaken hell of a hole. It
was a long straggle of a dusty road down in the va