The new comic, John Lomas, was a great success. He was a fat little man in the fifties with a thorough knowledge of his business, which was to make any and every kind of audience laugh. A wonderful stock of tricks he had, tricks of voice, of limbs, of gesture, of facial expression, nothing but tricks, inexhaustible. He cared about nothing in the world but what he called "the laugh," and when he got one he wanted another, and always had a quip or a leer or a cantrip to get it. But he was a rascal and a drunkard, and had lost all sense of the fitness of things and always went on too long until his audience was weary of him. Therefore he had come down and down until he found an appetite to feed that was gross enough to bear with his insistence. . . . He said--it may have been true--that he had played before the King of England, and he was full of stories of the theaters in London, the real nobby theaters where the swells paid half a guinea for a seat and brought their wives and other people's wives in shining jewels and dresses cut low back and front. He had played in every kind of piece, from the old-fashioned kind of burlesque to melodrama, drama, and Shakespeare, and he had never had any luck, but had always been on the point of making a fortune. "Charley's Aunt," he said, had been offered to him, and he had taken an option, but at the last moment his backers failed him. "And look at the money that had made and was still making." His first stage of intoxication was melancholy, and then he would weep over the mess he had made of his life and grow maudlin and tell how badly he had treated the dear little woman who had been his wife so that she had left him and gone off with a bloody journalist. When that mood passed he would grow excited and blustering, and brag of the slap-up women he had had when he was making his thirty pounds a week. His most intimate confessions were reserved for Matilda, for he despised Copas because he had never known anything better than a fit-up. And of Mr. Mole he was rather scared. "I don't know," he would say to Matilda. "I don't know what it is, but your guv'nor ain't one of us, is he now?" And when Matilda agreed that Mr. Mole was different he called her a silly cuckoo for not making him take her to London and the Continong to have a high old time. He could play the piano in a fumbling fashion, and he used to sing through the scores of some of the old pieces he had been in, with reminiscences of the players who had been successful in them and full histories of their ups and downs and their not unblemished lives, all with a full-throated sentimentality that made every tale as he told it romantic and charming. Broken and rejected by it as he was, he worshiped the theater and gloried in it, and the smell of the grease paint was to him as the smell of the field to a Jewish patriarch.