There is a special subdivision of munchers who frequent the boxes both in theatres and at concerts. They are like the queen bees in the hive of theatre-goers. They are monstrously fat, female, and innocently foolish. Instead of having a pinched and wispy appearance, they are like the plump, precocious, affected, happy-looking children who perform on the music-hall stage. It is possible that the inferior munchers rear and keep these immense females to decorate the boxes, feeding them luxuriously at all hours, while they themselves subsist on their timid feasts of chocolate that tastes of hair oil.
The right attitude for the box can, surely, only be acquired by special culture and constant practice. To begin with there must always be a huge white arm with a podgy little hand on the end of it draped along the edge of the box. The gigantic body, squeezed like blancmange into whatever mould the latest fashion dictates, is turned towards the stage. The round, good-natured face, with its natural vulgarity breaking through the assumed air of the Princess of Many Sorrows (imagine a jolly country butcher’s wife in a tableau as “Our Lady of Pain”), is directed down and towards the auditorium at the angle of a turnip about to fall from a shelf. Bless the dears! It is a treat to see anyone so happy. But that is what the munchers are, depend upon it.
CHAPTER VIII: SHEER TEMPER
Justice and Generosity are often supposed to be a pair of excellent friends who have an influence for good on one another’s character. But Generosity has a still closer friend whom she says nothing about, namely Injustice. She cannot always behave as freely as she would like when Justice is there, explaining things and being so absolutely right. But when Injustice has been to tea with her, talking his bad, unscrupulous talk, making everything so gay, and putting the blame on all the wrong people, then Generosity has a free hand and can be as lavish as she likes.
“Come in here for a minute,” said Reginald to Percy one morning in the City, “I want to get this hat ironed.”
There was some delay, and Reginald was both clear and original in what he said. Percy was lost in admiration. The shopman, expert in silence, by long practice, forbore to reply except by deprecating sounds which but served to inspire Reginald to a richer eloquence. At last the hat was brought in, ironed to perfection. Reginald finished his sentence, which glowed with the imaginative splendour of a Turner sunset.
“Oh, we never make any charge, sir, for ironing a hat,” said the expertly silent shopman.
“I don’t agree with you,” said Percy, removing from his coat the little tufts of hair which his friend had flung about in his careless agony. “You had the ball at your toe; then was the time to express a large, generous forgiveness for the unconscionable delay.”