He smiled back at her, entered the saloon and mounted some thickly carpeted stairs upon the left.
At the top of the stairs a glass door opened into a little ante-room, furnished with a few arm-chairs and small tables on which Punch and other journals were lying. Beyond, another door stood half open, and at the noise of Mr. Charliewood's entrance a short, clean-shaved, Jewish-looking man came through it and began to help the visitor out of his dark-blue overcoat lined and trimmed with astrachan fur.
Together the two men went into the inner room, where Mr. Charliewood took off his coat and collar and sat down upon a padded chair in front of a marble basin and a long mirror.
He saw himself in the glass, a handsome, tired face, the hair too light to show the greyness at the temples, but hinting at that and growing a little thin upon the top. The whole face, distinguished as it was, bore an impress of weariness and dissipation, the face of a man who lived for material enjoyment, and did so without cessation.
As he looked at his face, bearing undeniable marks of a late sitting the night before, he smiled to think that in an hour or so he would be turned out very different in appearance by the Jewish-looking man in the frock coat who now began to busy himself with certain apparatus.
The up-stairs room at Proctor's toilette club was a select haunt of many young-middle aged men about town. The new American invention known as "Vibro Massage" was in use there, and Proctor reaped a large harvest by "freshening up" gentlemen who were living not wisely but too well, incidentally performing many other services for his clients. The masseur pushed a wheeled pedestal up to the side of the chair, the top of which was a large octagonal box of mahogany. Upon the side were various electric switches, and from the centre of the box a thick silk-covered wire terminated in a gleaming apparatus of vulcanite and steel which the operator held in his hand.
Proctor tucked a towel round his client's neck, rubbed some sweet-smelling cream all over his face and turned a switch in the side of the pedestal.
Immediately an electric motor began to purr inside, like a great cat, and the masseur brought the machine in his right hand, which looked not unlike a telephone receiver, down upon the skin of the subject's face.
What was happening was just this. A little vulcanite hammer at the end of the machine was vibrating some six thousand times a minute and pounding and kneading the flesh, so swiftly and silently that Charliewood felt nothing more than a faint thrill as the hammer was guided skilfully over the pouches beneath the eyes, and beat out the flabbiness from the cheeks.
After some five minutes, Proctor switched off the motor and began to screw a larger and differently-shaped vulcanite instrument to the end of the hand apparatus.