"My dear fellow, why can't you always talk like that?" "I'm going to," replied Bakkus, pausing in the act of lighting one of Elodie's special reserve of pre-war cigars. "Don't you realize I'm just transplanted from a forcing bed of High Anglican platitude?" But Elodie shrugged her fat shoulders in some petulance. "You men always stick together," she said. Chapter XV The unventilated dressing-room of the Olympia Music-Hall in Marseilles reeked of grease paint, stale human exhalations, the acrid odour, creeping up the iron stairs, of a mangy performing lion, and all manner of unmentionable things. The month of June is not the ideal month to visit Marseilles, even if one is free to pass the evening at a café table on the Cannebière, and there is a breeze coming in from over the sea; but in copper-skied thundery weather, the sirocco conditions of more southerly latitudes, especially when one is cooped up in a confined and airless space, Marseilles in June can be a gasping inferno. Andrew, in spite of hard physical training, was wet through. His little white-jacketed dresser, says he, perspired audibly. There was not so much air in the dressing-room as tangible swelter. He sat by the wooden table, in front of a cracked and steaming mirror, the contents of his make-up box laid out before him, and (save for one private dress rehearsal carried out in surroundings of greater coolness and comfort) transformed himself, for the first time, from General Lackaday into the mountebank clown, Petit Patou. The electric lights that should have illuminated the mirror were not working--he had found, to his discomfort, that manifold things in post-war France refused to work--and two candles fainting into hopeless curves took their place. Anxiously over a wet skin he painted the transfiguring lines, from lip corner to ear, from nostril to eye, from eye to brow, once the mechanical hand-twist of a few moments--now the painfully concentrated effort of all his faculties. He finished at last. The swart and perspiring dresser dried his limbs, held out the green silk high-heeled tights which reached to his armpits. Then the grotesque short-sleeved jacket. Then the blazing crimson wig rising to the point of its extravagant foot height. He felt confined within a red-hot torture-skin, a Nessus garment specially adapted to the use of discarded Brigadier-Generals. He sat on the straight-backed chair and looked round the nine foot square flyblown room, with its peeling paper and its strained, sooty skylight, which all the efforts of himself and the dresser had failed to open. It was Mademoiselle Chose, the latter at last remembered, an imperious lady with a horror of draughts and the ear (and--who knows?--perhaps the heart of the management) who had ordered it, in the winter, to be nailed down from the outside. As proof, the broken cords. "Tell the manager that if it is not unnailed tomorrow, I shall smash a hole in it," said Andrew.