“Listen, Carlos — ”

“I repeat, a great improvement.”

The pianist laughed pointedly and the others grinned.

“You make the suggestion to Lord Pastern,” said the tympanist. “He’s going to be your ruddy father-in-law. Make it and see how it goes.”

“I think we better do it like he says, Carlos,” said Mr. Bellairs. “I think we better.”

The two men faced each other. Mr. Bellairs’s expression of geniality had become habitual. He might have been a cleverly made ventriloquist’s doll with a pale rubber face that was constantly and arbitrarily creased in a roguish grimace. His expressionless eyes with their large pale irises and enormous pupils might have been painted. Wherever he went, whenever he spoke, his lips parted and disclosed his teeth. Two dimples grooved his full cheeks, the flesh creased at the corners of his eyes. Thus, hour after hour, he smiled at the couples who danced slowly past his stand; smiled and bowed and beat the air and undulated and smiled. He sweated profusely from these exertions and at times would mop his face with a snowy handkerchief. And behind him every night his Boys, dressed in soft shirts and sculptured dinner-jackets, with steel pointed buttons and silver revers, flexed their muscles and inflated their lungs in obedience to the pulse of his celebrated miniature baton of chromium-tipped ebony, presented to him by a lady of title. Great use was made of chromium at the Metronome by Breezy’s Boys. Their instruments glittered with it, they wore wrist-watches on chromium bracelets, the band title appeared in chromium letters on the piano, which was painted in aluminium to resemble chromium. Above the Boys, a giant metronome, outlined in coloured lights, swung its chromium-tipped pendulum in the same measure.