John Charles Chisholm-Urquhart, K.T., 9th and last Duke of Ayr; also Marquess and Earl of Ayr, Marquess and Earl of Dumbarton, Earl of Kilmaurs and Kilwinning, Viscount Dalry and Dalgarven, Viscount of Brackenbrae, Lord Urquhart, Inverew, and Troon, Baron Chisholm, Earl Chisholm, Baron Hurst, Baron Urquhart of Coylton, Lord Urquhart of Dumbarton, and Baron Dalgarven.
The last Duke of Ayr! Nobody in the world to inherit one of all those splendid titles! Not even a duchess to survive him!
The press commented just as ruefully as Dorothy upon the extinction of another noble house. Dukes and dodos, great families and great auks, one felt that they would soon all be extinct together.
"It's a great responsibility to marry a peer," Dorothy thought.
She gently and tactfully let Olive know that she had found out the identity of the great man, and they went together to stand for a minute or two outside Ayr House, where the hatchment, crape-hung, was all that was left of so much grandeur and of such high dignities and honors. Nor did Dorothy allude to the duke's omission to provide for Olive in his will, though, being a bachelor without an heir, he might easily have done so. No doubt death had found him unprepared; but the funeral must have been wonderful, with the pipers sounding "The Lament" for Chisholm when the coffin was lowered into the grave.
"I'm very glad they're closing 'The Duke and the Dairymaid' this week," said Dorothy. "I should hate to see that title now on every 'bus and every hoarding."
The Vanity's last production had not been such a success as either of its two predecessors, and many people about town began to say that if John Richards was not careful the Frivolity was going to cut out the Vanity. Therefore in the autumn of 1905 a tremendous effort was made to eclipse all previous productions with "The Beauty Shop." Early in August John Richards sent for Dorothy, gave her a song to study, and told her to come again in a week's time to let him hear what she made of it. To print baldly the words of this great song without the melody, without the six beauties supporting it from the background, without the entranced scene-shifters and the bewitched audience, without even a barrel-organ to recall it, is something like sacrilege, but here is one verse:
When your head is in a whirl.
And your hair won't curl,
And you feel such a very, very ill-used girl.
Chorus. Little girl!
Then that is the time—
Chorus. Every time! Every time!
To visit a Bond Street Beauty Shop.
Chorus. To visit our Bond Street Beauty Shop.