“Indeed I do,” replied Miss Breezy. “Whenever I meet those people it takes me some time to get over the unpleasant smell of meat fat. What about them?”
“Cissie, the daughter, has gone into the chorus of the Gaiety, and is very happy there. She’s going to be in the second row at first, but she’s bound to be noticed, she says, because she has to pose as a statue in the second act covered all over with white stuff.”
“Nothing else?”
“No, but it will take an hour to put on every night. And before the end of the run she’ll probably be married at St. Margaret’s to an officer in the Guards, she says. She told me that she couldn’t hope to become a lady in any other way. I was wondering what you would say if I did the same thing?”
Miss Breezy almost dropped her cup as Lola knew that she would. “You don’t mean to say you’ve come to tell me that you’ve got that fearful scheme in the back of your head, you alarming child? A chorus girl?”
Lola laughed. “You know my way of improving myself: to serve an apprenticeship as a lady’s maid, a respectable way,—the way in which you’re going to help me now that you’ve thought it all over.”
The answer came like the rapping of a machine gun. “I’ve not thought it over and what’s more, I’m not going to begin to think it over. I told you so.”
Without turning a hair Lola handed a plate of cakes. “But you wouldn’t like me to follow Cissie’s example, would you,—and that’s the alternative.” Poor dear old Aunt! What was the use of pretending to be firm. All the trumps were against her.
But for once Lola miscalculated her hand and the woman. “If you must make a fool of yourself,” said Miss Breezy, “you must. I’m not your mother and luckily you can’t break my heart. I told you the other night and I tell you again that I do not intend to be a party to your lowering yourself by becoming a servant and there’s an end of it.” And she waved her disengaged hand.
It was almost a minute before Lola recovered her breath. She sat back, then, and put her head on one side. “In that case,” she said in a perfectly even voice, “I must try to get used to the other idea. I think I might look rather well in tights and Cissie tells me that if I were to join her at the Gaiety I should be put into a number in which five other girls will come on in underclothes in a bedroom scene. Of course I should keep my own name and before long you’d see my photograph in the Tatler as ‘the latest recruit to the footlights,—the great-great-granddaughter of the famous Madame de Brézé.’ I should tell the first reporter that, of course, to make it interesting.”