“They get all sorts here now!” retorted his companion. “The old Hexagon is quite the rage again, I’m told!” Fashion, always capricious, is never more fickle than in the distribution of her favours among those who cater for the _monde ou l’on s’amuse_. For no apparent reason a grill-room, a bar, a night-club, or the like will suddenly receive from the hand of the goddess the patent that confers fame. It lives its little hour; for a spell it resounds to laughter and music, the popping of corks, and the scurry of waiters, while the shareholders bask in the warmth of unwonted prosperity like a cat in the sun. Then as mysteriously, but also as suddenly as success, decline sets in: the nightly line of private cars and taxis outside the brilliantly lighted portico dwindles: the gold lace on the porter’s cap begins to tarnish; and ultimately provincials, to whose ears the fame of the resort has only tardily come, find themselves facing fellow provincials across a vista of empty tables. Sometimes the wheel turns full circle and popularity comes back. So it had gone with the Hexagon Buffet. Time was, in the days of the “Crutch and Toothpick Brigade,” when it had rivalled “Jimmie’s” as the haunt of the _jeunesse dorée_ in their skin-tight clothes, their opera-capes, and their covert-coats. Then oblivion had slowly claimed it and, in the years between, the riff-raff of the West End had gathered nightly at the long bar with the battered brass rail where once the chappies had stood and chaffed “Maudie” and “May” over a “B. and S.” But now, in the fullness of time, prosperity had returned to the “old Hex.” The fine proportions of its big central room left ample space for a dancing-floor between the long bar at one end and the railed-off enclosure at the other where one dined or supped. A jazz band of negroes and an expatriated mixer who, when America knew not Volstead, had enjoyed continental fame, showed that the Hexagon had adapted itself to the spirit of the age. Custom flowed back. It was as though the trainers and the jockeys and the bookmakers, the fighting-men and their managers, their impresarii and tame journalists, had suddenly remembered the old Hexagon. At their heels came the wealthy patrons of sport, the older men at first, drawn by memories fast fading of wild nights in the eighties, then the young “knuts,” and with them, to dance a little and eat devilled bones after the theatre, chorus ladies, revue girls, and females, unattached or attached, of varying ages and social standing.