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But my case was not so bad as that of a friend of mine, a doctor. He married a leading actress, and was known ever afterwards as “Miss B- ‘s husband.”

At public dinners, where one takes one’s seat for the evening next to someone that one possibly has never met before, and is never likely to meet again, conversation is difficult and dangerous. I remember talking to a lady at a Vagabond Club dinner. She asked me during the entree–with a light laugh, as I afterwards recalled–what I thought, candidly, of the last book of a certain celebrated authoress. I told her, and a coldness sprang up between us. She happened to be the certain celebrated authoress; she had changed her place at the last moment so as to avoid sitting next to another lady novelist, whom she hated.

One has to shift oneself, sometimes, on these occasions. A newspaper man came up to me last Ninth of November at the Mansion House.

“Would you mind changing seats with me?” he asked. “It’s a bit awkward. They’ve put me next to my first wife.”

I had a troubled evening myself once long ago. I accompanied a young widow lady to a musical At Home, given by a lady who had more acquaintances than she knew. We met the butler at the top of the stairs. My friend spoke first:

“Say Mrs. Dash and–“

The butler did not wait for more–he was a youngish man–but shouted out:

“Mr. and Mrs. Dash.”

“My dear! how very quiet you have kept!” cried our hostess delighted. “Do let me congratulate you.”

The crush was too great and our hostess too distracted at the moment for any explanations. We were swept away, and both of us spent the remainder of the evening feebly protesting our singleness.

If it had happened on the stage it would have taken us the whole play to get out of it. Stage people are not allowed to put things right when mistakes are made with their identity. If the light comedian is expecting a plumber, the first man that comes into the drawing-room has got to be a plumber. He is not allowed to point out that he never was a plumber; that he doesn’t look like a plumber; that no one not an idiot would mistake him for a plumber. He has got to be shut up in the bath-room and have water poured over him, just as if he were a plumber–a stage plumber, that is. Not till right away at the end of the last act is he permitted to remark that he happens to be the new curate.

I sat out a play once at which most people laughed. It made me sad. A dear old lady entered towards the end of the first act. We knew she was the aunt. Nobody can possibly mistake the stage aunt–except the people on the stage. They, of course, mistook her for a circus rider, and shut her up in a cupboard. It is what cupboards seem to be reserved for on the stage. Nothing is ever put in them excepting the hero’s relations. When she wasn’t in the cupboard she was in a clothes basket, or tied up in a curtain. All she need have done was to hold on to something while remarking to the hero:

“If you’ll stop shouting and jumping about for just ten seconds, and give me a chance to observe that I am your maiden aunt from Devonshire, all this tomfoolery can be avoided.”

That would have ended it. As a matter of fact that did end it five minutes past eleven. It hadn’t occurred to her to say it before.

In real life I never knew but of one case where a man suffered in silence unpleasantness he could have ended with a word; and that was the case of the late Corney Grain. He had been engaged to give his entertainment at a country house. The lady was a nouvelle riche of snobbish instincts. She left instructions that Corney Grain when he arrived was to dine with the servants. The butler, who knew better, apologised; but Corney was a man not easily disconcerted. He dined well, and after dinner rose and addressed the assembled company.