Straight lines were esteemed above dancing, straight lines of Frenchmen or Spaniards in the Procession of Nations, straight lines of Lowestoft or Dresden in the Procession of Porcelain, straight lines of Tortoise-shell Butterflies or Crimson-underwing Moths in the Procession of Insects. Jenny's gay deep eyes were obscured by tricolor flags or the spout of a teapot or the disproportionate antennæ of a butterfly. There was no individual grace of movement in swinging down the stage in the middle of a long line of undistinguished girls. If the audience applauded, they applauded a shaft of vivid color, no more enthusiastically than they would have clapped an elaborate arrangement of limelight. Everything was sacrificed to the cleverness of a merely inventive mind. More than ever Jenny felt the waste of academic instruction in her art. She had been learning to dance for so many years, and there she was beside girls who could neither dance nor move, girls who had large features and showy legs and so much cubic space for spangles.
But if her personality did not carry over the footlights and reach the mighty audience of Drury Lane, behind the scenes it gradually detached itself from the huge crowd of girls. Great comedians with great salaries condescended to find out her name. Great principal boys with great expanses of chest nodded at her over furs. Dainty principal girls with dainty tiers of petticoats smiled and said good evening in their mincing, genteel, principal girl voices. Even the stage doorkeeper never asked her name more than once. Everybody knew Jenny Pearl, except the public. So many people told her she was sure to get on that she began to be ambitious again, and used to go, without being pressed, to Madame Aldavini's for practice. The latter was delighted and prophesied a career—a career that should date from her engagement (a real engagement this time) at Covent Garden in the spring.
Jenny's popularity at the theater made her more impatient than ever of home. She bore less and less easily her mother's attempts to steer her course.
"You'll come to grief," Mrs. Raeburn warned her.
"I don't think so."
"A nice mess Edie made of things."
"I'm not Edie. I'm not so soft."
"Why you can't meet some nice young chap, and settle down comfortable with a home of your own, I can't think."
"Like Edie, I suppose, and have a pack of kids. One after another. One after another. And a husband like Bert, so shocking jealous he can't see her look at another man without going on like a mad thing. Not this little girl."
Jenny never told her mother that half the attraction of boys' society nowadays lay in the delight of making fools of them. If she had told her Mrs. Raeburn might not have understood. Jenny was angry that her mother should suspect her of being fast. She was sure of her own remoteness from passionate temptation. She gloried in her security. She could not imagine herself in love, and laughed heartily at girls who did. She was engaged to sixteen boys in one year, to not one of whom was vouchsafed the light privilege of touching her cheeks. They presented her with cheap jewelry, which she never returned on the decease of affection, and scarcely wore during its short existence. It was put away in a cigar-box in a tangled heap of little petrified hearts.