Derek tried not to look superior. “It’s usual,” he said. “Galaxy Theater, boy,” and presently received a pink slip of paper entitling him to the occupancy of two stalls that night. Nothing would have surprised him more than not to have received it, an hour before the curtain rose on a musical comedy in the first flush of brilliant success. They ate and mostly their talk was superficial. It preserved a superficial air when men who had been killed were spoken of and only once did there seem divergence in their points of view. Some technical point of gunnery came up and Derek, who was at the War Office, agreed that “We can’t improve it yet. But I tell you, old man, in the next war--” “That--that was a topping Turkish Bath we went to before dinner,” said Rupert. Derek stared. “What!” he gasped. “I’m changing the subject,” said Rupert with a smile of forgiveness for his friend who had been home too long, too near to the newspapers and the War Office. At the Front, they didn’t talk of the next war, they were fighting the last of the wars. But he didn’t want argument with Derek to-night. “Are you through that liqueur?” he asked. “Let’s go on to this theater, shall we?” Rossiter could not and did not expect his commissionaires to emulate the silky suppleness of cosmopolitan head waiters, but it was impressed upon them that they were not policemen on point duty but the servants of a gentleman receiving their master’s guests; he neglected nothing, “producing” the front of the house as he produced the entertainment on the stage or the business organization in his office. It was whispered to husbands that his most exquisite achievement was the ladies’ cloak-room. You might leave your restaurant savage at the bill, but by the time you had progressed from the Galaxy entrance to your stall, you were so saluted, blarneyed, caressed, that there was no misanthropy in you. It captivated Rupert; he couldn’t, try as he would, duplicate Derek’s stylish air of matter-of-fact boredom. Yesterday he was in hell and to-morrow, very likely, he would swear if the waiter at the hotel brought up tepid tea to his bedside; but to-night he hadn’t made adjustments, to-night he was impressible by amenity. And he had read in the papers that London had grown unmannerly! Outrageous libel on an earthly paradise.