BOOK III
She went first into a tobacconist's—and sold cigarettes. Sometimes she suffered from actual want, and ate fried fish. "Do you know how nice fried fish tastes in London,—you on 'the Oilan'?" she wrote gayly. "I'm getting on splendidly; so's John Gale, I suppose, though he's looking cadaverous from starving himself all round. Tell aunty I haven't seen the Queen yet, though after all I really believe she has not seen me."
Then, after a severe struggle, she succeeded in getting on the stage as a song and dance girl. She sang melodiously and danced divinely, so remarkably that the ignorant public, knowing her to be a Manx girl, and vaguely associating her with the symbol of the Isle of Man, supposed she had three legs. She was the success of the season; her cup of ambition was filled. It was slightly embittered by the news that her friend Jinny Jones had killed herself in the church at the wedding of her recreant lover and the American heiress. But the affair was scarcely alluded to by the Society papers—who were naturally shocked at the bad taste of the deceased. And even Golly forgot it all—on the stage.
BOOK IV
Meanwhile John Gale, or Brother Boreas, as he was known in the monastery, was submitting—among other rigors—to an exceptionally severe winter in Bishopsgate Street, which seemed to have an Arctic climate of its own,—possibly induced by the "freezing-out" process of certain stock companies in its vicinity.
"You are miserable, and eager to get out in the wicked world again, my son," said the delightful old Superior, as he sat by the only fire, sipping a glass of mulled port, when John came in from shoveling snow outside. "I, therefore, merely to try you, shall make you gatekeeper. The keys of the monastery front door are under the door-mat in my cell, but I am a sound sleeper." He smiled seraphically, and winked casually as he sipped his port. "We will call it, if you please—a penance."
John threw himself in an agony of remorse and shame at the feet of the Superior. "It isn't of myself I'm thinking," he confessed wildly, "but of that poor young man, Brother Bones, in the next cell to mine. He is a living skeleton, has got only one lung and an atrophied brain. A night out might do him good."
The Father Superior frowned. "Do you know who he is?"
"No."
"His real name is Jones. Why do you start? You have heard it before?"