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the psychological moment and leaping on it like a ton of bricks the second it shoved its nose up.
    The conversation had turned to her work. She had said something about her chances of doing a quiet sneak to bed at a fairly early hour, because she was supposed to be on the set, made up, at six on the following a.m. for some retakes; and the mere idea of being out of the hay at a time like that made me quiver with tender compassion.
    'Six o'clock!' I said. 'Gosh!'
    'Yes, it's not an easy life. I often wonder if one's public ever realize how hard it is.'
    'It must be frightful.'
    'One does get a little tired sometimes.'
    'Still,' I said, doing a spot of silver-lining-pointing, 'there's money in it, what?'
    'Money!'
    'And fame.'
    She smiled a faint, saintly sort of smile and champed a spoonful of ice-cream.
    'Money and fame mean nothing to me, Lord Haver shot.' 'No?'
    'Oh, no. My reward is the feeling that I am spreading happiness, that I am doing my little best to cheer up this tired world, that I am giving the toiling masses a glimpse of something bigger and better and more beautiful.'
    'What ho,' I said reverently.
    'You don't think it silly of me to feel like that?'
    'I think it's terrific'
    'I'm so glad. You see, it's a sort of religion with me. I feel like a kind of priestess. I think of all those millions of drab lives, and I say to myself what does all the hard work and the distasteful publicity matter if I can bring a little sunshine into their drab round. You're laughing at me?'
    'No, no. Absolutely not.'
    'Take Pittsburgh, for instance. They eat me in Pittsburgh. My last picture but one grossed twenty-two thousand there on the week. And that makes me very happy, because I think of all those drab lives in Pittsburgh being brightened up like that. And Cincinnati. I was a riot in Cincinnati. People's lives are very drab in Cincinnati, too.'
    'It's wonderful!' She sighed.
    'I suppose it is. Yes, of course it is. All those drab lives, I mean. And yet is it enough? That is what one asks oneself sometimes. One is lonely now and then. One feels one wishes one could get away from it all and be just an ordinary happy wife and mother. Sometimes one dreams of the patter of little feet...'
    I waited no longer. If this wasn't the psychological moment, I didn't know a psychological moment when I saw one. I leaned forward. 'Darling,' I was just about to say, 'stop me if you've heard this before, but will you be my wife?' when something suddenly went off like a bomb inside my head, causing me to drop the subject absolutely.
    It happened in a flash. One moment, I was all fire and romance, without a thought for anything except that the girl who was sitting beside me was the girl I loved, and that I was jolly well going to put her in touch with the facts: the next, I was hopping round in circles with my hand pressed to my cheek, suffering the tortures of the damned.
    Whether by pure spontaneous combustion, or because I had inadvertently taken aboard too large a segment of ice-cream, the old Havershot wisdom tooth had begun to assert its personality.
    I had had my eye on this tooth for some time, and I suppose I ought to have taken a firm line with it before. But you know how it is when you're travelling. You shrink from entrusting the snappers to a strange dentist. You say to yourself 'Stick it out, old cock, till you get back to London and can toddle round to the maestro who's been looking after you since you were so high.' And then, of course, you cop it unexpectedly, as I had done.
    Well, there it was. A fellow can't pour out his soul under those conditions. In fact, I don't mind admitting that at that juncture all thoughts of love and marriage and little feet and what not had passed for the nonce completely out of my mind. With a hasty word of farewell, I left her sitting and proceeded to the chemist's shop by the Beverley-Wilshire Hotel in quest of temporary relief. And next day I was in the dentist's waiting-room, about to keep my