What the ladies suffer goodness and they--the terms are perhaps synonymous--alone know. If and when the Suffragettes come into power, we shall have a prodigious counterblast to tobacco that would delight the Stuart James of unsainted memory or the now illustrious Balzac. For although the militant sex has many members who rejoice in a cigarette, the majority are bitterly adverse to an expensive habit, offensive to those who do not practise it, and exceedingly uncoquettish when indulged in seriously. Probably if the reign of My Lady Nicotine had never begun, and if no other enslaving habit of a like nature had taken a similar place, the theatres would be better off than at present. Permission to smoke will not deal with the difficulty; yet probably the habit of smoking keeps a very large number of people away from the theatre. Without proposing to win any of the colossal prizes offered to people who guess the quantity of tobacco imported into this country in a particular month, one may venture to assert that there has been a tremendous increase in smoking during the last twenty years; and, indeed, we all know that the man who does not smoke is almost a curiosity nowadays. The rules of offices, the customs of certain trades, the etiquette of some professions, and the like, prevent a great many men from having more than a trifling flirtation with tobacco till after dinner. The greedy smoker may get a pipe after breakfast, a whiff during lunch-time, and a pipe before dinner, which he takes distrustfully, because he has been told not to smoke on an empty stomach, but he looks to the hours after dinner for the debauch that turns his lungs from pink to brown. Moreover, there are many men who do not care to smoke till after dinner. What a deprivation to all these to be bustled through a shortened dinner, to be scalded by coffee hastily drunk, and merely get a few puffs before they find themselves in a playhouse, where, by the way, so that insult may be added to injury, they often watch the actors smoking comfortably. A wise manager would not allow smoking _on_ the stage except in very rare cases. The _entr'actes_ amount to little; there is a rush of smokers, but many cannot leave their seats without giving offence to their companions, and some are too timid to fight their way from the centre of a row; and, after all, the _entr'acte_ smoke, which takes place in a crowd so thick that you cannot tell the flavour of your own cigarette from that of other people, is rather irritating than satisfying. Of course there remains the period after the theatre, but it is comparatively brief for the man of whom we are speaking, since after the labours of the day and the fatigue of the evening he is tired enough to be rather anxious for sleep.