And Edwin understood, and realised the justice of the poet’s choice of a confidant so sympathetically that he was spurred to confidences on his own part. “You see, I happen to be a poet myself,” he said, and to prove it he felt bound to recite a sonnet that he had composed a year or two before at St. Luke’s. A magnificent sonnet it seemed to him, perhaps more magnificent for the accompaniment of a song in waltz rhythm by the theatre orchestra. It was flattering to find that Byron agreed with him as to its excellence; but while the poet was pressing his hand in congratulatory brotherhood, and Edwin was just deciding to recite it all over again, the sinister figure of Mephistopheles appeared and parted them, telling him that Miss Marie Loraine was now singing the last verse of her song and that in two minutes it would be his duty to present her with a bouquet and a pair of silver hair-brushes. Still reciting the most telling lines of his sonnet, he was conducted by Mephistopheles through the manager’s office, where a young lady who, in her inviting softness, resembled Miss Wheeler, was counting the counter-foils of tickets, and through a subterranean passage with the welcome chill of a catacomb, to the wings of the theatre, where a florid bouquet was thrust into his hands. It struck Edwin that the scent of the flowers was of a suffocating heaviness, until he realised that the overpowering perfume of which he was aware proceeded not from the bouquet but from the scents and powders of a bevy of creatures of unnatural loveliness who stood waiting in the wings. They were the ladies of the chorus, and the nature of their costume would have given them an excuse for shivering; but they did not appear to be conscious of the heat that throbbed in Edwin’s brain. The scent and the proximity of such a huge expanse of naked flesh excited him. At this moment all his awkwardness seemed to have vanished. He could not believe that he was the same person who had blushed at the mere contact of the American girl’s overall, or sat speechless in the presence of Miss Wheeler at the Dousita. His old modesty seemed to him to have been a ridiculous and inexcusable folly; for, at the moment, he would have welcomed the prospect of making the most shameless advances to any one of these houris in competition with any man of his acquaintance. With the air of a Sultan he surveyed them, deciding to which of those blossoms the handkerchief should be thrown. “Now get along with you,” said the stage-manager, pushing him forward.