“I’ll try, but Billy is five feet six, his hair is black and he’s got a Roman nose.” “I don’t care: I want him.” “And his salary is sixteen.” “Who cares?” Billy would be wired for, cajoled into giving up the certainty of his tour for the uncertainty of a London run, his touring manager would be placated with a substitute at half Billy’s salary, and the London Manager would pay Mr. Chown precisely nothing for these services. Did Mr. Chown, then, help lame dogs over stiles for nothing? Not at all: he received ten per cent of the actor’s salary for the first ten weeks of a run, from the actor. His brains and his system were at the service of the manager, but it was the actor who paid all while receiving certainly not more than the manager who paid nothing, not even compliments to Mr. Chown on the astonishing efficiency of that compilation of many years, his card index. That was the bread and butter work of Mr. Lexley Chown, but his portly form was not nourished on Lenten fare, nor was his wine bill paid out of his card index. He was an industrious seeker after talent buried in the English provinces; he had the flair--not the nose, for, remarkably, Mr. Chown was not a Jew--for discovering young people of merit whose market value, under intelligent handling, would in a few years be in the neighborhood of a hundred pounds a week. It is a profitable thing to be sole agent of a number of people each earning a hundred pounds a week. When business was good--and Staithley was a good “No. 2” town--Mr. Alastair Montagu was capable of believing what his posters asked the public to believe about the merits of his company, but in his most optimistic, his most characteristically showman-like mood, he could not persuade himself that Lexley Chown had come from London to Staithley looking for stars of the future amongst the sprightly old women and elderly young men of “The Woman Who Paid” company. There was old Tom Hall, of course, a sound actor who ought to be in London, but Chown knew all about Tom, and about Tom’s trouble, too. Whisky drinkers on Tom’s scale weren’t Chown’s quarry, nor, indeed, he reflected, were sound actors either. To be a “sound actor” is to be damned with faint praise and a mediocre salary. No: Chown must be after something at the music-hall, and Montagu had “popped in” the other evening without seeing anything extraordinary. But that was just it, with Chown. There was nothing extraordinary about the people he discovered until after he discovered them; then every one saw how extraordinary they were. Chown, shaking Montagu’s hand and bending over it with an inclination of the body which seemed derived from Paris rather than London, was merely Chown not differentiating between this unimportant touring manager and the great ones of the earth who paid high salaries to established reputations. But Mr. Montagu was flattered, he had a fine capacity for flattery.